


The Hand That Feeds

by whyamilike_this



Series: Machinery of Violence [2]
Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Breathplay, But That's Part of the Fun, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Like A LOT of Rough Sex, M/M, Non-Consensual Bondage, Physical Abuse, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rough Sex, Young Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty), not a feel good fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:55:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24329911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whyamilike_this/pseuds/whyamilike_this
Summary: Those eyes. That was the first things Rick thought of when his brain lurched painfully back into existence. Two wide brown eyes full of…something. Rick couldn’t put a name to it because no one had ever looked at him like that before. But whatever it was, it was something big, something massive, something Rickliked. Over the last week, he’d spent so much time remembering those eyes - remembering that look - that it was burned into his brain with a fucking soldering iron and the place inside of him where it livedthrobbed.Or wait, no. It wasn’t the memory of that boy, that kid -that Morty– making his head ache like his brain wanted to burst out of his skull. That probably had more to do with the socket wrench that hit him across the face.(Or the one where young Rick finds what he’s looking for and nearly loses his life.)A prequel to Psycho Killers.
Relationships: Rick Sanchez/Morty Smith, Rick Sanchez/Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty), Young Rick/Old Rick
Series: Machinery of Violence [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757386
Comments: 22
Kudos: 87





	The Hand That Feeds

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the prequel to Psycho Killers no one asked for.

Those eyes. That was the first things Rick thought of when his brain lurched painfully back into existence. Two wide brown eyes full of… _something_. Rick couldn’t put a name to it because no one had ever looked at him like that before. But whatever it was, it was something big, something massive, something Rick _liked_. Over the last week, he’d spent so much time remembering those eyes - remembering that look - that it was burned into his brain with a fucking soldering iron and the place inside of him where it lived _throbbed_.

Or wait, no. It wasn’t the memory of that boy, that kid - _that Morty_ – making his head ache like his brain wanted to burst out of his skull. That probably had more to do with the socket wrench that hit him across the face. Rick furrowed his brow, regretting the expression immediately when his frown tugged at bruised skin. If he was remembering correctly, that wrench had hit him _a couple_ of times. Unsurprisingly the facts were proving themselves hard to unravel at the moment.

Whatever the case was, one of his eyes was swollen practically shut and the entire left half of his face smarted painfully in time with his heartbeat - a steady, brutal agony that fought valiantly for all of his attention. But Rick was no stranger to pain so he embraced it, used it as fuel for the rage always simmering low in his gut.

His hands were pulled behind his back with thick, familiar handcuffs. The lock was too complicated for Rick to crack without the lock-picker he kept in his pocket but - considering the sting of cold metal against the bare skin of his arms and legs – that little bit of forethought did him fuck-all of good. He’d been stripped down to his boxers. Figured. The Old Man might be sloppy sometimes but even black-out drunk he was still a genius.

Rick shifted and the motion made him feel like he was tumbling down a flight of stairs even though he barely moved, curling up on his side. The arm he was laying on was dead, and a slight tug at his cuffed wrists told him they’d been attached to the bolt the Old Man drilled into the floor not too long after they’d moved to the moon of Shmlaron and set up base. It wasn’t an entirely unexpected predicament except usually Rick was conscious when he wound up tethered to the floor. Conscious and angry and horny and fully aware what he’d done to trigger the Old Man. And while the bruises likely turning his face into Picasso’s blue period weren’t new, the rolling, ungraspable shape of his thoughts was an unwelcome addition.

The Old Man usually didn’t hit him hard enough to _knock him out_. Rick felt his lips pull his throbbing cheek down into a frown. He assumed it was an unspoken agreement – as two men who respected their own intelligence above all else, brain damage was supposed to be off the table. Apparently he’d been wrong about that.

Squinting his eyes open (his _one_ eye open – the other one was swollen shut and useless), the first too-bright sliver of the world Rick took in was the metal floor, a small puddle of blood collected below his nose. He could tell from the dark, opaque sheen to it he’d been out a while – long enough to stop actively bleeding and for the puddle to dry into a dark red smear. He ran his tongue over his teeth and tasted the gunky copper tang still coating his lips. The upper one was split and stung at the faintest hint of pressure.

Rick snuffed out a breath, trying to clear the last of the blood and snot out of his nose, hating the way it dripped down his chin but incapable of wiping it away with his hands cuffed behind his back. He didn’t bother trying to rub it off on his shoulder like he might have before – back when he had no idea how crazy an itchy nose could make a man when they couldn’t scratch it – not that knowing it was futile made it any easier to ignore the tacky feel of his own dried blood coating his face or lessened the instinctual desire to feel out the damage he couldn’t take stock of in a mirror.

Rick huffed out a long, wheezy breath through his still clogged nose and fought the urge to sigh. Jeezus, even the thought of a cigarette made his head ache.

A painful, squinty-eyed glance around the room proved that the Old Man was nowhere in sight – Rick’s head throbbed as he absently wondered if the bastard had passed out in the shower stall again or if he was asleep in the ship’s backseat. He clearly was pulling some kind of power play – ignoring Rick when he needed medical attention or some of those blue painkillers from Flaxon or - _fuck it_ \- Rick would settle for a fucking _Midol_ at this point.

The Old Man couldn’t have gone far but Rick knew from experience shouting would only prolong his torture. The Old Man was just as stubborn as him and expressing anything besides clinical apathy only fueled his bubbling pot of sadism. So Rick laid there and breathed through the pain in his head and ran through every swearword from every language he could remember, seriously hoping the faint hint of gaps in his memory were his imaginations.

The air was hazy – the lights overhead glowing with a sickening aura that slatted to the ground in perfect conical streaks – and Rick chewed over thoughts of brain damage. Did he still know the equation for general relativity? What about special relativity? And the Callan-Symanzik equation? Yes, they were still all there in his head but picturing them, pulling them up from his internal archive, took a lot more effort than normal and fucking _hurt_ besides which couldn’t be great news.

With a groan that reverberated around his tender head like a shockwave, Rick forced himself to sit up _slowly_. The tilt of the world to right-side up made the acid in his stomach heave and he had to close his eyes against a wave of nausea. Once the spinning slowed down, he leaned forward to uselessly test the give on his cuffs. Not that he expected any. The Old Man didn’t fuck around. Still, scientific curiosity demanded he check.

The cuffs were the same ones the Old Man usually pulled out whenever Rick fought him too hard: thick shackles practically custom formed for him, sharp edges cutting into the knobby pisiform bone of his wrist, four thin but durable chains between the two metal bands. A padlock looped through the chain and connected it to the sturdy metal ring on the floor – Rick could blindly make out the shape of it with his fingers. It clanked heavily when he twisted his hands. The bands around his wrists were too tight to wriggle out of without breaking his thumb – and jeezus hadn’t he tried that before – but they didn’t cut off his circulation and they helped him center himself with anger while Rick’s thoughts threatened to drift back into the blankness of unconsciousness.

He couldn’t pass out – he had to stay awake, had to resist the alluring pull of sleep no matter how heavy and exhausted he felt - because something unusually fucked up was going on and he needed to get to the bottom of it.

The last thing Rick remembered clearly… they had made a delivery.

No – that was a while ago – Rick had only thought about that outing with clockwork regularity until the memory was crystal clear, recallable at the slightest brush of thought, even when his brain was scrambled to shit.

Something else had happened after that but remembering was like trying to see what was on the other side of a black hole – Rick felt himself press against the dark void in his memory but all he got for the effort was another round of nausea and a particularly aggressive throb of agony in his possibly fractured skull. Fuck. Did he have a concussion? Probably.

Rick reevaluated. He squinted his eye open again and turned his head slowly – his vision still blurring with the motion - to take in the area in his immediate radius. The door to the hangar bay was to his right. The desk straight ahead. The undressed mattress to his left. He was bolted in the dead-center of the room and the normal clutter they rarely bothered to pick up had been cleared away in an almost comically perfect ten-foot circle around him.

Rick’s discarded pants were in front of him and to the right and even though he knew just from looking he wouldn’t be able reach them, he had to try. He lowered himself to his side again, wincing as he scooted towards the crumpled denim and his arms were pulled uncomfortably high behind him. He was flexible, and with a little work he could wrangle his hands up his back and over his head, but he was also positive that level of exertion would make him vomit out his brain. He could tell already it wouldn’t be worth the effort anyways. His stretching toes weren’t within four feet of his goal so he gave up, curling up on his side feeling oddly winded.

He closed his eyes to stop the world from spinning and tried again to remember, working his way back from the surest point in recent history.

There was that delivery on Io about a week ago. Then the Old Man got high on flipdons for a few days while Rick tinkered with his ship. It was easier to steal parts from the Old Man’s extensive collection of spare shit when the guy was too busy tripping balls to notice anything go missing so Rick hadn’t bothered keeping track of how long the Old Man alternatively paced circles around the room and stared vacantly through the plexiglass, sclera dyed lime-green with space psychedelics.

The Old Man’s high petered out eventually – most likely he ran out of flipdons to grind up and smoke – and after he fucked Rick raw the geezer passed out on the mattress and snored for what had to be at least twenty-eight hours, no matter how loud Rick turned up his music. When the Old Man woke up, he was extra-cranky but there was a very thin line between _normal_ -cranky and _extra_ -cranky when the bastard lived with his own fist up his ass.

Things after that were hazy. Images and thoughts came back to Rick in pieces with edges sharp enough to hurt but Rick was no stranger to pain and he was good at figuring out how things fit together.

Faintly, Rick remembered having a conversation with the Old Man. Not the words but the tone of his voice. An amiableness that was so unlike the Old Man that Rick briefly wondered if he was inventing memories in the throes of an aneurism. Less unusual was the sensory-memory that followed, a cold trickle that ran down Rick’s back when shit got _real_ bad – the shiver ghosting over him again like an echo - but try as he might, he couldn’t remember what he’d done to wind up bashed over the head with a socket wrench.

Rick had been trying to ignore it but that trickle had been lingering on the sharp ridges of his spine since he’d woken up. Because this was new. New and _bad_.

The Old Man had been on a rapid downswing for however-the-fuck-long they’d lived on the moon of Shmlaron which was _too fucking long_ but this was a problematic low point. Stupidly Rick had told himself the Old Man’s exaggerated mood swings and amped up violence was just a phase – like the couple months his mom spent actively avoiding his company after Rick hit a growth spurt that made him taller than her. His mom snapped out of it after the cops picked him up drunk in the woods at the age of twelve and he figured the Old Man would pull his shit together too when the right incentive came along. Rick hated being wrong but he wasn’t a fucking _head-doctor_ \- how the fuck was he supposed to know the geezer would snap and bash his head in?

Especially since, as a rule, the two of them didn’t _talk_ much. Or rather it wasn’t often they did anything that any sane person might call a conversation. The Old Man flapped his mouth endlessly – rambling, rambling, _always_ rambling. Drunk off his ass and spewing bullshit and hate speeches and ‘advice’. No fucking thank you.

What they did more realistically would be called _arguing_. And they did that _a lot_. Over _everything_. What to eat, where to sleep, which buyer would cough up the most cash. Who drank the last beer, who smoked the last cigarette, whose fault it was the planet they were fleeing blew up. They bickered and they shouted and they used their fists when they felt like they weren’t being heard to which was often. Neither of them were particularly good listeners.

The first time they fought – the first time they _really_ got into it – was also the first time they fucked. Considering the rest of Rick’s sex life, that hadn’t come as a surprise.

It had only been a few days - maybe a week - since the Old Man popped out of a green spiral that flared into existence from thin fucking air outside the truck stop Rick was bumming around. It wasn’t exactly _shock_ that encouraged him to limply allow some strange geezer to manhandle him through a portal to an alien landscape that could have been the inspiration for the pulp magazines Rick used to pick up from the corner store, but it was something close to it.

Rick might have been on the cusp of turning seventeen but he was smart and he was savvy and he knew when someone was lying to him. So while the Old Man’s story - _‘I’m_ you _but from the future. Okay, no no-_ uuugh _-t the_ future _, technically, a - another dimension, one fifty years ahead of here_ ’ – should have sounded like a load of shit, four dimension hops later Rick was a believer.

Looking at the guy was halfway enough to convince him alone. He was _undeniably_ Rick. Older obviously, _fucking eldery_ , and just the tiniest bit taller and broader, Rick still clinging to the edge of stringy as he closed out his teen years. But he had the same blue eyes, the same unibrow, and the same blue-silver hair. Rick had gone grey early - something he might have found more annoying if it didn’t help him buy beer – and that was one of many facts the Old Man laid down beside a whole spectrum of disturbing and previously unspoken thoughts to finish the trick and _prove_ he was Rick.

Even then, Rick hadn’t liked the blasé way the bastard had rattled off his innermost secrets.

‘ _You pretend you don’t like The Beach Bo-_ oough- _ys but you do_.’

‘ _You’re the one who blew up the neighbor’s chicken coop – and_ yeah _your mom fuckin’ knew all about it but she didn’t tell the cops cause it was your thi-_ eeugh- _rd offence and they’d throw you in jail_.’

‘ _You tell everyone who asks you were too big for a small town but you - you’re_ a- _aaaugh-_ ctually _running around the country looking for your – your piece of shit dad._ In fact _– ugh, I bet you’re wondering if_ I’m _your dad but I’m not. He’s some – so-_ ooough _-me fucking junkie living in Utah and he’s gonna try to scam you for money and you’re gonna be – it’s gonna piss you off for a_ long time _so don’t fucking bother._ ’

It sucked to hear but it did the job.

So when the Old Man said, “You wanna get the fuck out of here or what?” Rick said, “Fuck yes.”

They spent a week bouncing around by portal and Rick might have called it sight-seeing if it weren’t for all the weird aliens the Old Man haggled with at every new planet. Rick knew enough drug dealers to recognize the hallmarks but whatever he was selling wasn’t anything Rick recognized. The Old Man also had little tolerance for questions and a habit of smacking Rick over the back of the head if he got annoyed so Rick observed and listened and processed, figuring things out on his own.

They set up camp all over the place; sometimes squatting in empty houses, other times crashing with the Old Man’s acquaintances, and sometimes they lit a fire in an unoccupied field and lay out under foreign stars. The Old Man was bad company but shit – Rick could put up with a crotchety geezer _no fucking problem_ if it meant he got to see what the galaxy looked like from the other side.

The night they fought, they were holed up in some hidden workshop the Old Man obviously frequented considering the collection of half-assembled shit littering the room. Rick had no idea where it was or what it looked like from the outside – they had portaled directly into it and Rick’s half-disinterested searching uncovered no doors or windows. There was only the one main room filled with inventions and a side room with a beat-up couch.

The Old Man was blitzed off his ass, just like he always was, except instead of rambling or sloppily tinkering with the mess on his worktable or spitting insults into his phone, he was building a _neutrino bomb_. Rick - who couldn’t step away to take a piss for fear that the old bastard would connect the wrong wires and blow them to kingdom-fucking-come – finally reached his snapping point when the Old Man started cursing under his breath and stabbing the sensitive innards of the weapon with a screwdriver in an angry fit.

“Are you _trying_ to fucking kill us!” Rick shouted, dropping his lit cigarette on the work desk to grab the Old Man by both his forearms and backing him away from the mass of atoms more than capable of annihilating them and half the surrounding star systems.

“Gettha – gettha fuck off me –” the Old Man slurred back, yanking his arms away hard and fixing Rick with a glare that started off bleary and uneven but slowly focused into something razor sharp. The Old Man’s wrinkled face screwed up, the lines over his brow deepening in an exaggerated grimace, his nose scrunching up into a blatant look of disgust. Rick bared his teeth in return.

It had been rubbing him wrong all week. The Old Man never laughed at Rick’s jokes or smiled when something good happened. He didn’t sing along with the radio or make friendly small talk with the aliens he traded with. He hardly even blinked when they got cornered by that woman whose child they killed when their poorly-programmed satellite crashed into her home.

The Old Man only knew how to be mad. Mad or annoyed or frustrated or irritated. A million different nuances that added up to the same fucking thing.

And Rick could get it. The rage was always there inside him too – just under boiling point and so ready to bubble over – but he still felt other things; he knew joy and pleasure and laughter and how to have a good time. You’d never think the Old Man had a day of peace for how tightly he held himself, tipping into fury at the slightest provocation.

Luckily Rick was well-versed in being despised so the Old Man’s twisted look of disgust beaded off Rick’s back like water. Townies back home used to call him every uncreative name their imbecile brains could come up and Rick had learned to take pride in what he was. So what if he was a slut? So what if he fucked men? What goddamn difference did it make?

His mother had made the same disgusted face at him sometimes and Rick could never tell if it was because of all the bad choices he didn’t bother hiding from her or if she was even really looking at _him_ when she got that look in her eye. She had given Rick that disdainful glare a lot more as he got older and – not that he had any fucking clue what the guy looked like – but he wondered if it had something to do with the features he clearly hadn’t inherited from her.

That grimace of disgust was also usually the last parting expression after messy, unattached hook-ups in dark alleys and truck stop bathrooms. A greasy wad of cash thrown in his face and behind that a twisted up mouth that just barely didn’t seethe ‘ _you’re fucking trash_ ’ even though they all sang a different tune when his lips were wrapped around their cock. And Rick was, in fact, _a slut_ so it wasn’t entirely surprising that his dick gave a half-interested twitch in response to the Old Man’s revulsion – a Pavlovian response churning heat low in his belly.

Seeing _his own face_ twist into that scowl wasn’t exactly appealing. It was too much like looking in the fucking mirror - or maybe it was closer to how Dorian Gray must have felt looking at that painting aging in his attic. Horrified but oddly transfixed. Still, Rick could sense a fight brewing and his blood started singing in anticipation.

“You think you know _e-_ eeeeough- _verything_? You – you fucking…” the Old Man trailed off, drawing himself up to his full height and sloughing his drunkenness away like a cloak. But even if his slur dried up and he stopped wobbling in place, there was a distance in his eyes that told Rick he wasn’t any less wasted – just very capable of pretending that he wasn’t. “You don’t know _shit_. You haven’t even – you haven’t even seen a _fraction_ of the universe and you’re trying to tell _me_ what to fucking do?”

Rage surged hot and fast in Rick’s chest and adrenaline lit up his brain like sparks in dry grass. His cock pulsed against his thigh – anticipation flooding Rick’s body with excitement. “If you want to off yourself Old Man, go the fuck ahead,” Rick spat back. The portal gun – the magic remote that transported them all over the universe and _the only reason Rick put up with the nasty curmudgeon at all_ – was resting on its side beside the open-chested neutrino bomb and Rick made a swipe for it. “No way I’m – I’m not signing your fucking _suicide pact_ so _adios_ , _motherfucker_.”

Despite watching the Old Man fiddle with the device two dozen times over the last few days, Rick had never had a chance to hold the thing himself. The bastard was protective of it. Rick would be too - he’d been covetously eyeing it since the first life-altering swirl of green bloomed into existence in front of him. With a static pop of excitement, Rick snatched it up and was in the middle of fiddling with the small dial exploratively when suddenly his head jerked back and exploded in pain, the shock of being hit forcing him to stumble.

The Old Man hit him again – another punch to the same place on Rick’s cheekbone that was already starting to throb. Rick fell, catching himself on the worktable and watching in bleary-headed slow motion as the portal gun slipped out of his fingers and skittered across the desk.

“You _absolute piece of shit_ ,” the Old Man growled and the hair on the back of Rick’s neck stood on end as blood rushed to his dick. Rick like to fight and he liked to fuck and the place where those two things met gave him the best of both worlds. The endorphins released in a fight always keyed him up – made him rock hard – and the arousal only fueled his fury in a never ending loop; a horny, pissed off snake eating its own tail. “Don’t you fucking _dare_ ,” the Old Man continued, the threat in his rougher, deeper voice sparking along Rick’s spine. “If you _ever_ touch my portal gun again, _I’ll end you_.”

Rick turned to snarl over his shoulder but had to stop and catch his breath. The Old Man was _unhinged_ , his face flushed red with anger, hard fury turning his eyes to stone, and Rick’s blood rushed to meet the ferocity of the wrath at his back, his thickening cock pulsing harder than his throbbing cheekbone.

“You really think you could, Old Man?” Rick goaded, electricity lighting a flare in the back of his brain. “You’re fucking _ancient_. I’m – I’m in the prime of our life, baby.”

There was a moment when the Old Man almost blinked out of his rage-spiral – wide eyes and drooped lip so different from the anger usually contorting the lines of his face – but the moment fizzled out, his jaw clenching until fury slithered back across the planes of his face.

“So you think _you’re_ the superior model, huh?” the Old Man demanded, voice flatter than Rick had ever heard.

With unexpected speed, the Old Man’s fingers were fisted in Rick’s hair, smashing him nose-down on the table in one brutal slam. Rick – who halfway down let instincts take over and partially braced himself – felt pain bloom behind his eyes and blood rush out of his nose but he hadn’t heard the telltale crunch of broken cartilage. Still the sight of red dripping onto the table made his cock press against the tight denim of his jeans.

When the Old Man grabbed two fistfuls of the back of Rick’s shirt to spin him around, Rick followed the borrowed momentum and sucker punched the Old Man, raising the blow that had been meant for his groin to his stomach at the last minute. The change in plan meant the punch didn’t land as hard as Rick might have liked but the Old Man’s grunt was still satisfying.

Before Rick could pull back for another swing, the room tilted as he was tackled to the ground. Rick’s head and back slammed painfully into the cement floor and his breath left his chest in a heady ‘ _oomph_ ’. The Old Man used Rick’s temporary shock to straddle his torso and flip him over onto his stomach.

Rick heard the clank of metal before he felt the cool cuffs circle his wrists but short of breath and vaguely turned on, he didn’t fight as hard as he could to rear the Old Man off his back. Whatever little Rick _actually_ knew about the geezer currently pining him to the floor, he obviously had experience with handcuffs because Rick’s hands were chained behind his back in record time, the metal thick and heavy - nothing like the flimsy bracelets the cops back home slapped on him after they nabbed him in the middle of a fist fight.

Rick grunted when the Old Man turned him over in the space between two deceptively sturdy thighs. “ _I know everything about you_ ,” the Old Man taunted, lowering his furious face to hiss the words like a threat. Rick could _taste_ the cheap whiskey on the Old Man’s breath, his nose too stuffed up with the copper tang of his own blood to smell it. “I know what punch you’re gonna throw before you throw it bi- _eeeough-_ tch.”

As if to prove his point, the Old Man raised an open hand and slapped Rick _hard_ across the cheek already swelling up from the earlier blows. Rick clenched his teeth to keep from making a noise – he didn’t want to give the Old Man the satisfaction. “You don’t know _shit_ ,” Rick hissed from between his teeth.

“You think being young makes you better but it doesn’t – it makes you _stupid_ and _hormonal_.” Then the Old Man’s hands were at Rick’s fly, tearing open the button and the zipper. In a jerky lurch, the Old Man stopped straddling him and yanked Rick’s pants down to his knees in one rough tug. Rick’s erection bounced flushed and red and stiff, jutting away from his hips unapologetically, the sensitive skin shocked by the colder air. Rick only barely suppressed a groan.

“A couple dozen years doesn’t make you _smarter_ ,” Rick taunted, grunting when the Old Man gripped the fabric between his knees and forced his legs up, thighs pressed to his chest, arms uncomfortably crushed below him. Rick kicked out once, a tentative attempt that was nowhere near hitting the mark with how easily the Old Man had him pinned, and he got slapped again for his effort. While Rick took a moment to recover from the flash of white that streaked across his vision, the Old Man slotted himself back into place, his hips pressed against Rick’s ass.

“That’s not how things look from up here,” the Old Man returned and Rick was all too aware of the backs of his gnarled hands nudging against Rick’s thighs as the Old Man unzipped his khakis. With half his unibrow quirked, the Old Man dug around in one of his pockets before Rick heard a plastic snap and something wet and cold dribbled over his hole and down his crack.

“ _Hating yourself_ doesn’t make you smart- _er_ ,” Rick snapped back, choking on the last word when the Old Man jerked forward, the head of his dick stabbing into Rick’s unprepped channel. And instead of groaning or gasping or grunting or _anything_ that might have been at least a little bit sexy, the Old Man huffed a long breath out his nose – almost like an aggravated sigh – and turned flat eyes back to Rick. “Hating yourself just makes you _pathetic_ ,” Rick growled, angry and horny and desperate to see that flicker of something human again.

It didn’t work. The Old Man shot him an annoyed glare and reached blindly up onto the work desk. When his hand reappeared over the ledge, it was holding Rick’s still lit cigarette between two long fingers. Rick struggled, lashing out again with his legs, knowing too well what the bastard had in mind, but the Old Man was quick, the burning tip suddenly making painful contact with the back of Rick’s thigh. Rick grit his teeth, determined not to give into the shout that wanted to squeeze past his clenched teeth.

“A little something to commemorate the moment,” the Old Man grit out, sneering down at Rick, a wild animal caged behind his eyes.

“You geriatric _psycho_!” Rick seethed, the cigarette burn sucking too much of his attention away from the pulsing of his dick. Burns fucking _hurt_ – and a part of his brain couldn’t stop registering the pain in a way very different from how his busted face had somewhat faded into the background. Objectively he knew the mark had to be tiny, no more than a centimeter in diameter, but somehow it consumed all his thoughts. “Is this why you picked me up? You – what – you wanted to _literally_ _fuck yourself_?”

With wrathful indifference, the Old Man grabbed at Rick’s shirt, rucking it up inelegantly, gripping it from bottom hem to neckline and stretching it into a thick rope. He shoved the band of fabric between Rick’s teeth, pressing it down on either side of Rick’s head in a cleave gag, effectively immobilizing Rick’s limited struggling and muffling him in one simple move.

Rick teeth clenched around the fabric and he sucked in an obstructed breath when the Old Man bottomed out inside him.

It was a good thing Rick wasn’t a stranger to sex. If he was, it might have hurt more than it did. As it was, the stinging stretch was benign – a familiar precursor to pleasure – but the adjustment didn’t come quickly enough when the Old Man hovering over him pulled out and shoved back into him again.

“I know _all_ the stupid shit in your head – there’s nothing you haven’t thought that I didn’t think _first_ ,” the Old Man grunted above him, voice quaking with the force of his thrusts. The pace he set was slow but deep, his hips snapping forward brutally with every instroke. “You wanna go back to your earth? Go back to 196- _fucking_ -9? Back to whoring yourself out for cigarettes and drugs and a lift to California?”

The Old Man shifted, readjusting his angle, and suddenly Rick was seeing stars. He moaned behind the gag, screwing his face into the closest thing he could get to a glare when his eyes wanted to roll back into his head. Even the cigarette burn faded into the distance, pleasure numbing everything that wasn’t his stretched hole and his throbbing cock. With every thrust, the Old Man was hitting Rick’s prostrate and the stimulation was bordering too-much but Rick _lived_ for too-much.

The other guys he’d let fuck him were _garbage_ in comparison. They tended to finish before penetration shifted from painful and obtrusive to overwhelming and delicious and the few that made it past that point weren’t concerned about the pleasure of a teenager they were paying to fake it. Rick put up with it because it was a business transaction – it would be stupid to expect _good sex_ \- and besides, even if the rough-handed truckers didn’t get him off, he could jerk himself off afterwards with a fair amount of satisfaction, a fistful of bills clenched in his hand. The only reason Rick even _knew_ about his prostrate was because he’d shoved his own fingers up his ass to find it.

But the Old Man was a fucking pro. He was prodding at the sensitive bundle of nerves like his dick had pleasure-seeking radar. “I know how fucking _lonely_ you are – how sad and desperate and horny. I know because I _was_ you. I’m your fucking _future_ , dipshit.”

And there was something to be said about having _his own_ dick in his ass that was a strange taboo sort of bliss. He’d seen the Old Man’s cock already – the guy pulled it out wherever and whenever he pleased – and except for the balls which hung a little lower than Rick’s, the equipment was virtually identical.

So this was what it felt like to be fucked by Rick Sanchez. This was how the women he hooked up with outside of bars felt when he pressed into them in dark alleys. This was how the cute kid from biology felt when Rick cornered him in the bathroom at school before he got expelled. This was how that old guy from Mermon, Indiana felt when he stupidly offered to pay Rick double his normal rate to pitch instead of catch as if Rick wouldn’t have done it for free.

Now he knew what his _own_ dick felt like inside his body and what his face looked like when it started to flush with exertion (if you subtracted about fifty years).

The strange narcissistic thought keyed him up higher – made him writhe underneath the Old Man, his bound wrists pinned under his back useless and hurting and adding a sharp edge to the overwhelming stimulation making him sweat. More than anything he wanted to wrap a fist around his aching cock and stroke himself off – he could already feel himself teetering on the razor’s edge of orgasm – but he couldn’t push himself over. Not with the Old Man looking down at him with a careful sort of blankness that utterly lacked sex appeal.

The Old Man shut his eyes and tilted his face up to the ceiling when he came and Rick saw nothing of the one moment the bastard might have given himself away. The hot pulse inside of him – the way the Old Man trembled and let slip the slightest groan – almost pushed Rick into cumming himself but his untouched cock pulsed against his stomach in despair. Rick swore behind his gag, the words muffled into meaninglessness, and it wasn’t until he stopped the string of garbled profanity that the Old Man dropped his chin and stared at Rick with post-orgasmic contempt.

“Are you gonna be an asshole about this?” the Old Man asked, voice back to the flat grousing tone of their usual exchanges. “If you’re gonna be an asshole about this, I’ll spare myself the trouble and portal you back to 1969 right now.”

The Old Man peeled the gag out from between Rick’s teeth with a brusque apathy Rick hated even if he was too well versed in it for the disinterest to bite with real teeth. Rick could feel the sting of where the fabric had left indentations in the corners of his mouth and he tongued them absently, tasting dried blood from his busted nose.

“Thought you knew everything in my head,” Rick threw back at him, his voice raspy around the sarcasm, and the Old Man shot him a flat glare.

“Right. Then you can stay cuffed until you quit being su- _uuuugh-_ ch a little shit.” The Old Man grunted when he pushed himself to his knees, stumbling a little on his way to the room with the couch. “Don’t bother trying to kill me – I’ll – I’ve got a set of Glebos on door-watch and you won’t find out what a Glebo is or how to hack it for another thirty years.”

Then the door slammed closed and Rick was left alone on the cement floor.

Slowly he uncoiled his legs relishing the soreness of his ass and furious about the crippling, ready-to-burst pressure in his cock. The cigarette burn on the back of his leg was still making itself known - stinging and awful and annoying - but Rick ignored it. It wasn’t going to _kill_ him so it could fucking wait. His arms were slightly numb from his own weight and it ached to lean forward and stretch them out, blood rushing back into his hands.

But from there the routine was easy. Rick’s joints had always been hyper-flexible – a useful trick when Rick ran into the cops and on at least two occasions when a john thought they could get a little more than they were paying for – so he rotated his shoulder, slid his cuffed hands up his back, twisting and contorting his arms until he could drag his bent elbow over his head. His hands were in front of him in less than five seconds.

It was a small improvement but an improvement none the less, especially when he fisted his throbbing cock so furiously he nearly chaffed himself on his dry, rough hands. He came spectacularly, purposely painting the floor with his semen and leaving it there to dry as he panted and wiped his bottom lip with the back of his cuffed wrist.

Coming down was always a buzz kill and the smoking tendrils of something that wanted to be regret tried to coil around his stomach. Pointedly ignoring it, he lit a cigarette, rolled to his feet, and shuffled to the Old Man’s worktable with his pants around his ankles feeling wrathful and ridiculous.

The task of getting free - figuring out what he’d need to pick the cuffs, finding a useful tool in the Old Man’s clutter, and then working the delicate mechanism with his wrists locked together – took him an hour. An hour of sitting bare assed on the Old Man’s stool while he stewed, the cigarette burn on the back of thigh stinging when it nudged the edge of the seat.

He _did_ think about killing the Old Man. Rick was no stranger to rough sex but he had never so thoroughly lost the upper hand. On principle, Rick didn’t relish the idea of letting someone hurt him without any repercussions but the white hot neon anger that usually pointed him down the road of revenge was strangely absent. The urge to hold back his blows – that debilitating punch to the crotch he could have landed but instead rerouted to the Old Man’s stomach – had never been a problem when some trucker thought it might be fun to try choking him out mid-fuck. There was a reason he carried a switchblade in his back pocket. One - he belatedly realized - he hadn’t even reached for once in his altercation with the Old Man.

Maybe it was because the guy was old. _Old_ old. Old enough that a punch to the stomach could mean kidney failure. Wasn’t that what happened to Houdini? And that guy probably didn’t put away the liquor like the Old Man. Not that Rick drew the line at the elderly – if he was in a pinch there wasn’t much he _wouldn’t_ do – but he wasn’t about to jerk himself off over the idea of wailing on an alcoholic old man.

Or maybe it was because the Old Man was _him_. Rick. _A_ Rick. And _whatever_ fucking happened to the Old Man that made him despise himself so deeply he’d get off on hate-fucking a younger version of himself, that hadn’t happened to Rick yet. The idea of smashing in a version of his own face was still unsettling enough to avoid.

Whatever the case, Rick’s murder fantasy ended about the same time the cuffs slide from his wrists and clanked to the floor. He didn’t want to go back to earth circa 1969 - not after he’d barely had a taste of what the multiverse had to offer - so whatever the Old Man wanted, Rick could learn to put up with it.

Turned out what the Old Man wanted was mostly labor. Fix this. Move that. Shoot them. And Rick, despite the Old Man’s determination to never _teach_ him anything, learned _a lot_. He had always been good with machines and math and science but now Rick was picking things up faster than ever.

And yeah – so every once in a while they’d get into some stupid fight. Over the portal gun or Rick’s ship or who was supposed to be covering who in a shoot-out. Those fights always ended the same way. The Old Man was wily and just the tiniest bit bigger than Rick and it was enough to give him the advantage. And despite everything, Rick couldn’t quite bring himself to fight with the verve he did the aliens who occasionally _actually_ tried to kill him. So the Old Man would come out on top and then they’d fuck.

And it wasn’t bad. Rick wasn’t sure how much the Old Man got out of it. He never looked _wrecked_ the way Rick so wanted him to – Rick never got to watch his own future face twist up in unimaginable pleasure – but it felt good and he wasn’t too worried about whether the Old Man was enjoying himself or not cause the guy was an asshole. And once they had fucked things out of their system, everything would go right back to normal.

But this was different.

Rick had a sudden, sharp flash of memory – there was something about the way the Old Man had looked at Rick when he raised that wrench above his head – a faint edge of resigned determination to the corner of his usually cold blue eyes, the lines of his face drawn down, a sharp cut to the edge of his jaw. The air Rick breathed through his teeth came out in a hiss. If only his head would stop pounding maybe he’d be able to make sense of it.

With the slimmest finger-hold on his blurry memories, Rick clung to the partially remembered hint of a conversation. The Old Man messing around with a tangle of copper wires. Rick stretched out on the mattress and staring at his phone. What was he looking at? A photo? That was important – he could _almost_ see the shape it in his mind – but thinking too hard about it – thinking about _anything_ \- made his vision blurry so he forced himself to stop and take a few deep breaths. He wasn’t _panicking_ ; he was concussed.

Unexpectedly, Rick leaned over and threw up. The heaving of his stomach sent spikes of dull lightning through every synapse in his head and the view of bile joining the puddle of blood on the floor tunneled to black.

_Those eyes_ flashed across the throbbing emptiness behind his eyelids. Wide and brown, the pupils so blown out it was like stumbling across a deer at the edge of town and seeing moonlight reflect off its dark, limpid gaze.

The boy was there in the decrepit subway station on Io – he’d come with another Rick. An _old_ Rick. Another Old Man. Jeezus, what was a kid like that doing with another Old Man? Rick hadn’t see any bruises but that didn’t mean there weren’t any underneath his shirt.

The kid was too small and too young looking but there was something infinitely old in those wide eyes. Ancient in a way so different from the Old Man. Like the deer skirting the edge of town. Rick could read it in the boy’s blown out pupils – innocent but not naïve, sturdy but still soft, utterly obtuse but with surprisingly sharp edges.

Rick grunted and turned trying to escape the acidic smell of his own puke but his arms tugged him back. Warm metal looped around his wrists. He was cuffed. Why the fuck was he cuffed? Where the fuck was he?

He blinked his one good eye a couple times and some of the fog in his head cleared but the room still looked hazy – the industrial lighting casting white auras across the ceiling that Rick squinted at unhappily. Right. Beaten. Chained up. The Old Man pointedly absent. Fuck. Did he have a concussion? Probably.

The medical pod taunted him from the corner. So near and yet utterly unreachable with his hands cuffed to the floor. It was a relatively new addition to the room – the metal still factory-glossy in a way that made Rick’s head hurt to look at under the bright lights – and Rick resented its presence even more than he already did.

If it weren’t for _that thing_ Rick wouldn’t be in this mess. If the Old Man had _died_ that time he got shot through the stomach a few months back instead of hopping in that thing and popping out fresh as a goddamn daisy, Rick would be long gone, wandering space alone.

Or – another flash of brown eyes sent a zing of heat to Rick’s stomach – maybe he wouldn’t be alone.

Not like Rick had ever benefitted from the medical pod anyways. Even after the Old Man smashed up his face or fractured a rib, the bastard insisted he heal the damage himself the normal way, to _learn a lesson_ or whatever. Rick didn’t care much one way or another – he could handle a few bruises – but it seemed stupid when there was an easy solution _right fucking there_.

That thing would make quick work of whatever state his face was in and if it couldn’t _heal_ his brain damage, it would at least shoot him full painkillers. But until he figured out a way to snap the padlock connecting his cuffs to the floor, it was just as helpful as the blaster he kept tucked into his missing jacket or the spare lock-picking device he always carried in his jeans.

With a dejected sigh, he turned his attention away from the medical pod to the plexiglass window.

How long had he been out? Shmlaron, the planet that always watched them like a purple, cloudy eye, was three-fourths the way covered in night. Last he remembered… shit… it _hurt_ to remember but the light glinting off the metal the Old Man had raised to bludgeon him with was bright with full starlight reflected off lavender seas. So it had been a while. _Too_ long. Probably long enough for a good portion of Rick’s brain cells to die a premature death at the hands of a wrongly-wielded socket wrench. Fuck.

Rick should have seen this coming. He had never trusted the Old Man. How could he? The guy was fucking insane – of course he was, he was _Rick_ \- except he was _worse_ than Rick because aging clearly hadn’t done him any favors.

But Rick thought he was being careful. He wasn’t a fucking _child_ – he’d seen some truly seedy shit and wasn’t a stranger to the fact that most people were just _waiting_ for a chance to take advantage of a young, smart guy like him.

Admittedly the sex thing was dangerous - he’d known that after the very first time - but danger and his dick got along like a house on fire and he had always struggled with self-control.

He had thought there was some sort of tentative agreement there too. The punches were fine – they even amped him up a bit, made him feel invincible in a paradoxical way only adrenaline could accomplish – and despite the rough treatment, the actual _sex_ didn’t hurt outside normal expectation. Until recently, the Old Man always used lube and somewhere in Rick’s head that had translated itself into something resembling... not _care_ or _concern_ … but some kind of personal investment.

Rick _really_ hated being wrong.

Ironically, the Old Man was known around Rick-circles as being one of the more patient Ricks, something Rick found fucking hysterical. _Boring_ was closer to the truth. _Cowardly_. A total fucking buzz-kill.

‘The Feds’ had always been a nebulous threat, ever since the Old Man had picked Rick up the summer he turned seventeen. Thanks to a long history with some shady government organization, they had to be careful – had to watch their back – never portal to any of the _really_ interesting planets because those almost always had a Federation presence and the Old Man wouldn’t step foot in the same _galaxy_ with a Gromflomite if he could help it.

But after an overambitious and _massively stupid_ wanna-be drug cartel used the Old Man’s tech to blast the Kronos system out of existence, the heat started coming down hard.

“It’s o- _oooough_ -ur fucking brainwaves, dipshit,” the Old Man explained while they fled the _fourth_ remote location they’d been followed to by a tactical team of bugs. “The two of us together, we’ve gotta be the brightest fucking spark of genius on their scanners.”

“So what, we – we split up?” Rick demanded, purposely putting all his cognitive energy into ignoring the pit that was trying to open up in his stomach. Looking back at that moment, Rick _hated_ himself for being so sentimental.

“Tch –” the Old Man scoffed, climbing into the backseat of the stolen hovership and digging around in the trunk with his ass in the air. “You wouldn’t last a fucking _day_ without me.”

Rick cut his eyes back to the busy city road he was navigating and grimaced at the relief that stupidly wanted to make itself known.

“I’ve gotta – just gotta build something that’ll block our brainwaves,” the Old Man continued over the thunks of him rooting around among the handful of inventions he’d managed to cram into the trunk before the Feds were breathing down their neck.

“And you waited ‘til _now_ to fucking do that?” Rick demanded, glancing over his shoulder to be sure he’d lost the cars tailing them. He’d seen two of them t-bone a crowded bus at the last intersection but he could have sworn there was a third…

“It’s _complicated_ , asshole,” the Old Man grumbled around a huff of exertion.

“Why isn’t this a problem for other Ricks?”

“There’s – there’s ways around it – _fuck_ –” something heavy clanked against metal, “A short-cut. But we’re not using it.”

“And _why the fuck not_?”

“ _Because I fucking said so_ ,” the Old Man snapped back, an unusual tinge of desperation in his voice and Rick’s blood heated immediately at the hint of a fight. That was easier to accomplish when the missing Federation car blasted out from around a corner, scattering pedestrians and nearly plowing into Rick’s side of the car. A hail of laser blasts pinged against his door as the Gromflomite behind the wheel shoved his bug-arm out the window and started shooting. Rick turned on a dime, empty bottles rolling as he steered the car into a one-eighty and pressed the pedal to the floor.

“We’ll have to settle down somewhere for a while,” the Old Man continued, crawling back into the front seat with a glowing blue cube that he was wrapping with wires. Rick vaguely recognized it from a stop they’d made on Dulu nearly half a year ago. “A brainwave blocker is – it’s tricky stuff. Needs space and – and fucking _maintenance._ ”

Rick groaned, half his attention on dodging the enemy fire that was trying it’s hardest to clip their car, the other half on the Old Man’s hands when he stabbed a divot into the Dulu cube and jammed the wires into the small hole, rolling down the window and tossing it at the pursuing car before he shouted, “ _Floor it_!”

Rick watched the glittering Dulu cube in the rearview mirror as it bounced off the pursuing Fed’s windshield and shattered, thin lines of light exploding out of it and wrapping around the hovercraft, tightening like a knot around the metal hull and crushing it into a wad of tinfoil. Rick hollered in triumph but the most acknowledgement the Old Man gave his own success was the mean smirk his lips curled into as he pulled out his flask.

The moon of Shmlaron was their next stop. Their _last_ stop.

The Old Man wasn’t wrong – the brainwave blocker took a lot of work. And no matter their genius, they couldn’t downsize it into a reasonably portable size. It relied heavily on the massive buildup of rhodium under the moon’s surface and it was fragile – they had to tinker with it almost daily to keep it in running order. In other words, it was a _pain in the ass_.

So what started as a temporary solution slowly morphed into the _only_ plan for the foreseeable future. And because the Feds were still combing their neck of space with a fine tooth comb, the Old Man shifted his work from slap-dash heists and drug farming and rare-treasure adventures to full time inventor since he could do that from the safety of their moon hide-out.

And there was a market for it. Most Ricks didn’t have the patience for projects that lasted longer than they could feasibly go on a bender so there was a never-ending rotation of contraptions to build and sell. That was how the Old Man earned the reputation as ‘patient’. They were stuck on that fucking moon in that fucking apartment except for brief escapades out to get supplies or make trades so what the fuck else were they supposed to do? They built shit and they drank and they fought and they fucked.

Rick tried to leave a few months in. He knew taking the portal gun was out of the question – the Old Man broke three of his fingers the last time he’d touched the thing and he’d only been trying to keep the drunken bastard from accidentally smashing it open and killing them both. So once the Old Man began answering Rick’s constant litany of “ _When are we getting out here_?” with “ _Whenever I fucking feel like it_ ,” Rick started working on a project of his own.

It took nearly eight months of hard, complicated work – scrounging up scrap, inventing and testing engines, redefining physics and gravity and _logic_ – and the whole time the Old Man mocked him.

“What’s – why the fuck would we waste our time flying around in a dinky ship when we could _portal_ anywhere in the multiverse?”

“Because spaceships are fucking _cool_ , asshole,” Rick had answered indignantly and the Old Man had chuffed out a judgement grunt.

Rick purposely never mentioned that the ‘ _we_ ’ the Old Man so firmly believed in had nothing to fucking do with it. That news wasn’t going to go over well so he keep it to himself. Just because Rick hadn’t worked out the finer nuances of portal technology yet didn’t mean he was going to stick around and rot away like the Old Man was so content to do. He even had a destination in mind - Rick had the number of a Gazorpian chick he’d hooked up with on Kepler-11c and she seemed like she wouldn’t be opposed to traipsing the galaxy with Rick for a while. Plus she was pretty good with a gun which would come in handy with the Feds still trying to track him down.

Piece by piece, Rick soldered together the hull and wired the engine and pilfered most of the weirdly round-looking Dodge Taurus the Old Man kept in a pocket universe in the storage room and had seemingly forgotten all about. The whole time, he kept a mental tally, counting down the days until he’d be free of Shmlaron’s godforsaken moon and the Old Man and the endless march of days that had long ago blurred together.

It took so much work – so much effort and genius and hard labor – that the day Rick turned the keys in the ignition and the engine purred to life, he didn’t have the heart to exclude the Old Man from the maiden voyage, especially not when there was something glittering in those cold blue eyes that wasn’t anger for the first time in _ages_ – something that Rick guessed might be a fatherly sort of _pride_ \- but he had no frame of reference for that so maybe it was his imagination.

The Old Man actually crowed in delight when they blasted out of the hanger doors Rick had installed in the storage room and the sound of it was like getting punched in the stomach in all the best ways. Rick hadn’t heard him laugh in over a year – those occasions notable enough that Rick could count them on one hand. “You clever little shit, I can’t believe you figured it out already! I didn’t – most Ricks don’t invent out micro-verse technology until their _fifties_!”

It was the closest the Old Man had ever got to paying him a compliment and Rick was giddy with success - wildly, unimaginably happy – he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so _good_ even though the bastard was filling the cabin with spicy smoke which meant he’d pilfered one of Rick’s cigarettes. He couldn’t help but laugh along with the old man, shock and relief making his chuckles breathy. There was nothing holding him back anymore. He could go _anywhere_ , do _anything_ , see _anyone._

The blow to the side of his head was a two-for-one when he smashed the other side of his face against the window, distantly pleased that the glass didn’t crack under his cheek as he’d spent a lot of time designing it to be shatterproof. The steering wheel jerked under his hands and the ship dipped, careening towards a rock trapped in Shmlaron’s orbit.

Before Rick had pieced together what had happened, the Old Man grabbed him in a headlock and Rick was so hyper-focused on avoiding crashing his new ship to pieces on the asteroid he went limp in the hold, frantically pulling the ship to a halt as the Old Man wrestled him by the neck into the backseat.

“ _You fucking_ _idiot_ , did you honestly think I didn’t know?” the Old Man hissed in his ear while the arm around Rick’s neck tightened and his vision blurred with the lack of air. Rick groped sloppily for the pistol he kept in the back of his pants – too aware that a misfire would kill them both if it he shot a hole through the hull and all the air was sucked out of the ship - but he was recklessly, wildly desperate.

The stars on the other side of the glass swam before Rick’s eyes and he felt the slide of skin-warmed metal against his back when the Old Man carelessly disarmed him, the gun clattering where it was tossed into the trunk – the loss of its weight a tangible blow. Rick’s fingers clawed uselessly at the forearm crushing his windpipe but the angle was all wrong, the ship too confined for Rick to get the space he needed to leverage his way out, and he was losing energy exponentially as his blood ran out of oxygen. Red pinpricks started to dot his vision before the Old Man loosened up and shoved him forehead first against the window, the dull thud of his head barely registering to Rick as he gasped for air, catching himself on hands and knees on the backseat he’d only installed last week.

“Sonofa-” Rick rasped, his throat aching.

“I know your every move, motherfucker,” the Old Man cut off Rick’s his expletive. “You – what – you thought you could build a ship and _bail_?” The Old Man gripped another fistful of Rick’s hair and tried to smash his head into the glass again but Rick had the sense to brace his arm between the window and his cheek so skin collided with skin. Then hands scrabbled at the waistband of Rick’s jeans and this time Rick knew they weren’t looking for a concealed weapon.

The shock-delayed rage finally swept into all Rick’s hollowed out places and he roared, shoving himself up to his knees and swinging an elbow at the Old Man’s nose which crunched under the blow. The sound startled Rick in the quiet of the ship – a harsh crack that made him flinch instinctively, his own nose throbbing with an echo of remembered breaks – and the half-second pause was all the Old Man needed to grab him by the back of the neck and shove him face first into the cushion, pinning Rick with his weight.

“I brought you into this fucking universe –” the bastard grunted, his voice nasally and rough around the broken nose. “- I can take you out if I fucking want to,” he promised.

The Old Man was moving around, wrestling with Rick’s pants again and his own, but Rick’s attention was on trying to turn his face to the side so he could suck in a breath and relieve the pressure on his smashed face. When the Old Man finally released him, Rick lifted his head and gulped in a desperate pant that was cut too short when a loop of leather dropped over his head, past his face, and cinched around his throat.

The grip of the Old Man’s forearm across his neck had been bad enough but this – the Old Man’s belt? – was so much worse. With one solid tug, Rick was breathless - an undignified, choked-off gasp stealing past his lips - and then he was suffocating.

Rick finally managed to yank his hands out from under him and his fingers clawed at the band of leather around his neck but it was useless. The Old Man only pulled the belt tighter and Rick was sure his neck was bloody with scratches blunt nails, uselessly fingers trying to sneak under leather. Panicked, he flailed, shoving out in every direction with all the reserved energy he had left, but the Old Man’s weight on his back was crushing, and Rick’s face was filling with blood. His arms crumpled underneath him, unable to hold up his weight, and his upper body was slowly lowered, held up by the makeshift noose until his cheek met upholstery.

Rick’s vision tunneled, black fuzz leaking in around the edges of his eyes until all he could see was the metal joint where the driver’s seat met the floor, one bolt missing from the bracket. Rick thought he knew his ship top to bottom - that there wasn’t a single inch he hadn’t seen - but he’d never looked under the driver’s seat with his cheek on the back seat. He was fairly sure that was going to be the last thing he _ever_ saw when suddenly the Old Man loosened the slack and he sucked in a desperate, frantic gasp.

The rush of air to his oxygen depleted brain nearly made him faint and stupidly – _irrationally_ – his dick flooded with all the blood finally allowed to siphon out of Rick’s face, stiffening between his legs. The first gasp of unobstructed breath was so overwhelming, he had to ignore the instinct to spit out profanities and focus on panting and coughing – every neuron in his head screaming for more oxygen.

He was too weak to wedge a finger under the belt even though his hand was laying limp right next to his face and internally he screamed at himself to move, to fight back, to sit up and strangle the old bastard who had very nearly choked him out. But his body was unresponsive except for one pathetic twitch of his cock.

The Old Man started speaking over him but it was hard for Rick to make out the words over his own racing heartbeat and before he was satisfied – before his breathing had evened out and the taste of recycled air was anything but sweet – the noose cinched again and Rick arched, trying to follow the pull for more slack.

Rick could still breathe – _barely_ – a thin sliver of air sliding down his abused esophagus, but as soon as he shifted to reach for the belt, the Old Man yanked hard and Rick gagged as his throat closed. “Don’t even think about it,” Rick strained to hear the Old Man growl over the blood pounding in his ears. “I’ll – it doesn’t matter to me if I fuck you awake or unconscious.”

The thought of passing out – of his mind abandoning his body while it was in the Old Man’s less-than-gentle care – was repellent enough for Rick to still his struggles and he was rewarded by the return of that thin sliver of airflow. He was so focused on breathing, on sucking in fresh oxygen and forcing it out his wide open mouth in noisy gasps, he barely noticed the Old Man yanking down his pants.

“You think –” the Old Man continued, voice thick with anger, and Rick strained his ears to listen. “You think anyone will ever put up with you for longer than it takes to use you?” Rick had worse spat at him in truck stop bathrooms and nasty alleys behind bars – but the Old Man’s voice was too close to the one he heard in his own head when he lit up a cigarette and stared at the same hundred fucking stars visible on the other side of Shmlaron’s purple glow.

Then the Old Man shoved into Rick like he was spearing a pig with a spit. The Old Man hadn’t bothered with lube and it _hurt_ – thin skin pulling and stretching and tearing at the intrusion. Rick felt moisture leak down his cheeks and he hoped to fucking god it was blood.

“You think anyone could fucking _stand you_?” the Old Man rhetorically asked – it wasn’t like Rick could answer – but he still urged Rick to gargle a response when he furiously demanded, “ _Huh_?”

The pace the Old Man set was brutal right out the gates and Rick was making noises – awful, horrible, muted noises that he wanted to filter better but he couldn’t – not when he was teetering on the edge of choking out.

“You’re just an easy lay,” the Old Man emphasized with a hard snap of his hips and Rick’s face hit the door. “A _hole to fuck_.” With the Old Man’s hand pressed between his shoulders and Rick’s ass in the air while his neck craned up to alleviate the pull of the belt, he _felt_ like a slut – his pulsing cock an ever-present reminder that the Old Man’s words weren’t far off mark.

“You can fuck everything that looks at you sideways but no one will ever _care_ about you. The only way you’ll matter to anyone is if you kill their children or blow up their planet or – or fucking annihilate their race.”

Rick struggled then - one arm reaching back to shove uselessly at the Old Man’s sturdy chest – and the belt around his throat tightened.

“You’re fucking _trash_ ,” the Old Man vowed, serious as a fucking gunshot, and all the times Rick had heard those words before repeated in his head like a radio picking up a hundred stations at once. “Not – not worthy of the air you breathe.”

At that the Old Man pulled hard on the noose and Rick arched up onto his knees, the shift in position driving the dry cock into him at a different angle, pressing against Rick’s prostrate with every pass. Suddenly – _ferociously_ \- Rick was cumming, spurts of semen painting the backseat while his vision whited out.

The Old Man was true to his word. When Rick came to, he was crumpled in the backseat, his empty ass stinging and wet and more raw feeling than he last remembered it to be. Gingerly he prodded his hole but the smear that came away on his fingers wasn’t red so he wiped the snot off his upper lip with the back of his hand and turned his attention to the thing that hurt the most behind his abused ass.

Another cigarette burn, this one on his forearm, the skin red and angry looking where it was raised in a perfect little circle, a dusty smear of ashes surrounding it. Rick had been slowly amassing a collection of them, the number growing exponentially since they’d moved into the moon apartment. The one from the week prior when Rick had tried to peel the whiskey out of the Old Man’s hands as he puked his guts out into the incinerator still hadn’t entirely healed.

The Old Man himself was lounging in the passenger seat with a bottle of vodka tilted to his lips. And Rick thought _hard_ about reaching an arm behind the backseat to find his discarded pistol – thought about flicking off the safety and splattering the Old Man’s brains across the dashboard – but then ice blue eyes met his in the rearview mirror and the fantasy lost some of its appeal.

“You’re lu- _uuuuugh-_ cky I’m so forgiving,” the Old Man bit out. “But you better not forget. I’m the best you’ll ever get, bitch.”

After that Rick didn’t risk trying to bail. He had a gut-deep feeling the Old Man had tagged the ship somehow even though he’d surreptitiously swept it for trackers three times since the first flight and never turned anything up. He hated to admit it but the geezer had fifty years of technical genius on him and if he wanted to hunt Rick down, it would be laughably easy.

So Rick decided to wait him out. Eventually the bastard would get tired of their fight-and-then-fuck routine. Or maybe if Rick was really lucky, he’d drink himself to death before then. That looked more likely every day – the Old Man was _shrinking_ somehow, curling in on himself with substance abuse and age. That fucking painting of Dorian Gray. Rick hated watching it happen.

If the sex was rougher than it had been before, Rick could handle that. And if the Old Man hit him more frequently for less provocation, what did it fucking matter? And if all the time trapped in the moon apartment apparently inspired some _twisted_ fucking punishments, it only shifted Rick’s designs to a new goal.

The real key was the portal gun. He had to replicate it. The Old Man’s wasn’t an option – if Rick took it, he’d be easy to find. So he had to make his own.

He’d been working on it during the stretches of time the Old Man forced himself to rest by overdosing on alien sleeping pills. It was the only time Rick’s tinkering was _guaranteed_ to go unnoticed and if the bastard found out what he was doing, it would no doubt incur some Hiroshima-level retribution.

Rick blinked out of his thoughts, his bound arms throbbing with a cramp. Was _that_ why he was beaten and chained to floor? Had the Old Man found out about his portal experiments? That shouldn’t be possible, Rick was careful – _very_ careful - to leave no evidence behind. Then again, a mishap with a batch of apparently unstable portal fluid the week before – a vial accidentally knocked off the desk and shattered on the floor - had twisted their already-falling-apart couch into a pile of ashes that Rick hastily dumped into the incinerator. The Old Man only grunted in acceptance when Rick put the blame on him – told him he’d blasted it to pieces and chucked them into space in a blackout – but maybe he hadn’t bought the excuse.

Whatever the case, Rick still hadn’t figured out the nuances of portal travel.

At the moment, chained to the floor and beaten bloody, Rick regretted not using the day of almost-alone-time after the Old Man’s last bender to jump ahead with his research. But his ass had hurt from the pounding the Old Man gave him before passing out and Rick could never be sure how long or how deeply the Old Man would sleep – not when he was experimenting with new drugs.

Keeping his one good eye open hurt so Rick gave it up, lying down on his side, back turned to his puddle of puke and blood. More than ever he longed for the medical pod – or failing that, the undressed mattress he and the Old Man shared. The oblivion of sleep was calling to him even if he _knew_ that was a bad idea for _at least_ two reasons. But with his eyes closed and his good cheek resting on the cold floor, he let himself start to fade.

A glint of metal flashed behind Rick’s eyelids and the remembered brightness made his head throb.

A fine mist sprayed over an array of clean silver circuits in a thin shade of a flashback and the stupid thought ‘ _what the fuck is that red shit_ ’ flickered across his mind before his head exploded in pain.

Jeezus, he could feel it getting closer, feel his memories trickling in like a leaky roof in a rainstorm, but with every tidbit recovered, his head pulsed harder.

There had to be something better to think about. Something that wouldn’t make his head throb so bad the thought of blowing his brains out had a new strange appeal. Something that wasn’t the Old Man or Rick’s sore shoulders or the lightbulb in the corner that hummed ever so faintly if it was left on too long.

And there _was_ something good to think about - his mind stretched out for it with only the barest provocation:

Flickering fluorescent light reflected off brown eyes. Wide brown eyes. A boy. _Morty_.

It was a routine delivery. Hand off the shit he and the Old Man had been tinkering with for the last few weeks, take whatever payment the Old Man had negotiated, and get the fuck out of there. They’d done it a million times before. Worst case scenario the buyer might try to rip them off but Rick and the Old Man had dealt with bullshit like that enough to handle themselves just fine. Rick’s hand knew well the shape of the pistol tucked into the back hem of his jeans.

The buyer turned out to be another Old Man. Rick had only met a handful of other Ricks and it was already a handful too many. As a rule, Ricks didn’t get along well with each other – there was proof enough of that in Rick’s day to day life - but the few he had met were wily; more cunning and abrupt and unpredictable than their usual idiotic buyers, and Rick was immediately on edge.

The weird look the other-Rick kept shooting him – that grimace that Rick might have called _pity_ if Rick thought any iteration of the Old Man was even remotely capable of sympathy – didn’t do any favors to settle his nerves. Nor did the decrepit subway station on Io the Old Man had picked for the hand-off or the stupid fucking trench coat the other-Rick was wearing like a fucking cliché or the bulge at his hip that was obviously a gun.

After the usual round of twenty questions from the other-Rick (the same old song and dance that always started with ‘ _why are you so fucking young_?’), the Old Man shoved the shoe-box sized package into the other-Rick’s arms and grunted, “Now pay up.”

The box contained a new species Rick and the Old Man had painstakingly hand bred and then mechanically altered. They looked a lot like mice but they had opposable thumbs and a high enough IQ to unscrew ceiling vents, navigate motion detectors, and rewire security cameras. 

The jackass gave the box a shake like he _didn’t_ know it was filled with sentient, highly unique creatures and Rick snapped, “Watch it, dickweed,” on autopilot.

“ _Uh_ \- _Rick_!” a foreign voice – young and male and crackling with puberty – called from the stairwell the other-Rick had dramatically descended when he made his slightly late entrance and all three Ricks turned at the sound of their name. “Ah – I – I think I hear a siren…”

“We’re in a fucking city, _Mooooorty_ ,” the other-Rick called back, rolling his eyes and making the kind of face that said ‘ _you know how it is_ ’ at Rick in a bizarrely friendly way. He even huffed out a laugh and not for the first time, Rick wondered what traits could be found in other versions of the Old Man that he so glaring lacked. “There’s always sirens in a city. Yo- _oough-_ ur job is to use that shriveled little peanut you call a brain to deduce whether those sirens are meant for _us_.”

White shoes appeared on the stairs followed by lanky legs and a skinny torso. A boy. A teenager. He stopped descending the stairs before he was fully in view and crouched down, ducking to find the other-Rick. His response of, “I – yeah but last time I waited to be sure we nearly got –” was cut short when huge brown eyes slid to Rick.

“ _Woah_ ,” the boy – _Morty_ \- breathed the moment he’d had a chance to drink Rick in, the exhalation ripped out of him unbidden – Rick could tell because Morty raised a hand to cover his mouth and seconds later his cheeks darkened spectacularly.

It had been so long – fucking _forever_ – since someone had looked at him with something besides boredom or disdain or fury, Rick felt the sear of those eyes like a hot wire being pushed against his skin.

“ _Rick_?” Morty repeated, this time unmistakably directing the name at _him_ – and Rick realized he hadn’t heard someone call his name in a _very_ long time.

With the Old Man it was always _you little shit_ or _assface_ or _bitch_. He used a plethora of condescending names – they changed more frequently than the old fucker changed his underwear – not that Rick really needed a signifier to know when he was being spoken to. Ninety-nine percent of the time they were alone, just the two of them, sequestered in that goddamn apartment. If the Old Man was flapping his mouth, he expected Rick to be listening.

And the idea of day-in day-out saying Rick-this and Rick-that when they were _both Ricks_? Fucking ridiculous.

So it had been a _long_ time since he’d heard someone say his name and the single syllable traveled straight to his gut and lit his breakfast-whiskey on fire. Like a dog responding to a whistle, his dick pulsed hot in his pants.

“Like what you see,” Rick said around a grin he could feel turning feral, voice going low and smooth on instinct while the pink of the kid’s cheeks went three shades darker. With unwavering certainty, Rick _wanted_ that kid. It had been too long since he’d fucked someone that wasn’t the Old Man, too long since Rick felt like the one in control, and now Rick was staring down a five course meal when he’d been living off of crumbs for _years_.

The boy – Morty – visibly shook himself out of his ogling, his open mouth snapping closed. “What – did – did you clone yourself again, Rick?”

“ _Nope_ ,” the other Rick sing-songed, popping the p. “This one’s the real deal.”

“So what, like a – like a time traveler or something?” the kid asked, his eyes sliding again to Rick like he couldn’t keep them away. And _fuck_ , the heat and curiosity and _interest_ sparking in that brown gaze was lighting Rick ablaze. And there was something else there too – something _different_ , something that Rick had never seen before – and it was making Rick’s mouth water.

“So- _ooough-_ mething like that, yeah Morty.”

Rick knew he should chime in – he fucking _hated_ being talked about like he wasn’t standing right there – but the red-hot excitement pooling in his stomach like lava took up too much of his attention. With the way the kid was crouched, the back of his shirt had ridden up and Rick could make out a sliver of his skin above the waistband of his jeans; smooth and pink and young. The Old Man hardly never got naked – not when they were fucking at least – and when he did it wasn’t much to look at. Old wrinkled skin that still clung to an impression of the body Rick looked down and saw every day. But that glimpse of Morty’s skin made Rick feel like a repressed Victorian because he wanted to trace his tongue along that line of flesh and it would _kill_ him if he never got the chance.

And besides the snot-colored aliens they’d made a delivery to three months prior, the ones with mandibles instead of mouths, the only face he’d seen in – jeezus, how fucking long? – was his own. His or what his would look like in the future. And the Old Man was as interesting to read as a blank wall.

But the kid – _fuck_ – Rick could siphon his thoughts off his face like he was skimming oil off the surface of water. Morty was _checking him out_.

Weirdly, Rick’s thoughts jumped to his split eyebrow and greenish bruise around his left eye from when the Old Man had gotten frustrated over a few failed mice two days prior. Rick was pretty sure the t-shirt he was wearing was still stretched out and stained with blood and cum from the altercation. Stupidly, he faintly wished he had bothered to put on something a little less depressing just so he could see how red Morty’s cheeks could get when he _really_ looked good but the kid didn’t seem to be disappointed. Rick could tell from the brightness of his too-wide eyes.

Rick dragged his hand through his hair and slicked the wild locks back, a move he’d perfected back on earth when his favorite pass time was picking up strangers in bars he was too young to frequent, feeling _powerful_ in a way that traveled straight to his throbbing dick.

The kid visibly swallowed and averted his eyes, something like _shame_ flickering across his features – and Rick was thinking maybe Morty was closeted when the Old Man grit out, “He’s your fucking grandson for chrissake.”

His immediate incredulous thought of ‘ _What_?’ was so quickly stifled by a hotter flare of interest that incinerated any lingering doubt.

Without missing a beat, Rick quirked half an eyebrow and shot back, “He’s _your_ grandson. _I_ still know how to use a condom.”

“Technically he’s _m-_ uuuugh- _y_ grandson so both of you can fuck off,” the other-Rick chimed in. “Morty, go keep watch.”

“O – okay, Grandpa Rick,” Morty called back reluctantly, sliding his eyes one last time to Rick before turning away and scurrying back up the stairs.

“You gonna hand over the flipdons or what?” the Old Man grunted, holding his hand out expectantly at the other-Rick who dug around in his pocket and tossed over a beaten-up sandwich baggie full of dried slugs.

The Old Man exhaled a long, ragged breath and Rick was surprised to see a line of tension creasing his brow – a tightness to his shoulders and a squint to his eyes – which for the Old Man was such a shocking display of anxiety he may as well have been screaming at the sky. Rick watched the Old Man cut his eyes back to the empty stairwell, cold eyes assessing and thoughtful, and Rick mulled that new information over curiously.

“Don’t you ever get sick of hiding out on that rock of yours?” the other-Rick asked and before the Old Man could bite out an answer, Rick scoffed.

“What the fuck else are we supposed to do? The Feds are so far up our asses we can taste ‘em.”

The other Rick shot him a look – a confused, humorous glance that raised Rick’s hackles when he was still vibrating with thoughts of that peek of Morty’s skin. “Uhhh, you’re supposed to get a Morty. O- _ooough-_ bviously.”

“We’re done here,” the Old Man interrupted as Rick frowned.

“Get a Morty? That kid? _Why_?” Rick spoke over him, slapping away the fingers that tried to bunch themselves into the shoulder of his t-shirt.

“You don’t know?” the other-Rick asked, eyebrow raising to meet his receding hairline in an expression Rick would have been fascinated by for its novelty if only he weren’t starting to feel the tickling fury of a _secret_ that had been kept from him. The other-Rick started laughing, deep guffaws that were utterly foreign to Rick when combined with his older face before he turned to the Old Man. “Oh shit, you didn’t tell him! _Why_ didn’t you tell him? Wait, let me guess –”

“Not another fucking word,” the Old Man grit out, a pointed finger dangerously close to the other-Rick’s nose. “We’re leaving.”

“He blocks your brainwaves,” the other-Rick rasped out, clutching a stitch in his side and turning his attention back to Rick. “You didn’t have to – you don’t have to hide out on a moon off the ass end of _nowhere_ when you could pick up a Morty and just _sitting_ there he’ll do all the work blocking your brainwaves for you –” The laughing explanation cut off sharply when the Old Man clenched his fist and swung at the other-Rick’s face, popping him across the cheek, the exact place Rick’s face still stung from its last meeting with those knuckles. “Ugh – you _fucker_!”

“ _Rick_!” The soft patter of feet hurrying down the stairs drew Rick’s attention like the bang of a firework. When the doe-eyed face ducked into view, Morty took inventory of the scene in a single jittery glance and jolted into action. “I heard – _shit_ , are you okay?”

Morty scurried to the other-Rick’s side, slotting under an outstretched arm like he belonged there, his face scrunched up in concern and all his attention laser focused on his Rick like he was the center of the universe. Rick was struck with such a hot surge of jealousy he could have breathed fire.

“Let’s get out of here, Morty,” the other-Rick bit out, snarling at the Old Man and tentatively feeling out his bruised cheekbone. “This guy’s a fucking loser. Living in denial and – and misplacing all his aggression.” At that, the other-Rick swept Rick up in another calculative glance that Rick resented down to his core.

“And what the fuck do you mean by that?” the Old Man snarled, the anger radiating off him lighting Rick up like a live wire, adrenaline rushing to his fingertips and toes.

“It’s not ‘ _punishing yourself_ ’ if it’s not actually _you_ you’re punishing, dillweed.”

Morty spared one quick look at Rick who raised his hands placating – Rick wanted the kid to stay, he had so many _questions_ \- but Morty and his Rick were already backing away, the familiar whoosh of a portal heralding their retreat. When Rick finally pried his eyes off where a head of brown hair disappeared into thin air, it was to find the Old Man radiating fury like an oven.

“So you got yourself one of those or what?” Rick asked once they were back in the ship and some of the Old Man’s rage had died down to a manageable level as he watched stars speed past. With a flick of his wrist, Rick swerved them around a planet glowing molten red with lava, slingshot-ing around its orbit for the speed boost.

“One of wha- _aaaugh_ -t?” the Old Man asked, cracking into the sandwich baggie of dried slugs and popping a few into a round metal grinder he had braced between his knees.

“One of those kids,” Rick chanced a glance out of the corner of his eye, watching the Old Man pack another slug in before spinning the bag around itself a few times with a sharp twist and tucking it away into an inner pocket.

“ _Grand_ kid,” the Old Man emphasized, unable to help but correct Rick.

“Right. _Grandkid_ ,” Rick repeated.

It hadn’t escaped Rick’s notice that _a grandkid_ had never come up before. Sometimes when Rick was black-out drunk, he’d bring up an ex-wife and a daughter. Rick was fairly sure the geezer never remembered those conversations – stilted questions, slurred responses, a put-upon disinterested air. But Rick had pieced together the picture in his head: the Old Man had bailed on his wife and kid a long time ago when he discovered portal technology.

That was something Rick occasionally mulled over in quiet moments when the Old Man drank himself so close to death he didn’t even snore.

The bastard just _left_ them. He had a kid and a wife and with no warning, one day he’d packed up his shit and left. Fucked off into space – dealing drugs and building WMD’s and sleeping around and sure, Rick got the appeal, but what was he doing _now_? Hiding like a fucking coward. Holed up on a moon orbiting a nothing-planet because he was too afraid of being arrested or killed to live his fucking life. Drinking himself stupid over and over again in a one room apartment and narcissistically hate-fucking a younger version of himself.

That’s the life he’d _left his kid_ for.

Staring through the semi-dark at the hated metal ceiling, a clove cigarette tucked between his lips, Rick couldn’t help but wonder if that was what he was destined for. Becoming his own piece of shit sperm-donor of a father. Making the same mistakes as this lunatic, paranoid old man.

No fucking way.

“What was that kid’s name again?” Rick asked, tone carefully neutral and eyes fixed ahead of him out the windshield. Better not to sound _too_ interested. The Old Man had a habit of ruining the things Rick wanted. And there was something about the way the Old Man had reacted to the boy – a tension he didn’t usually show – that made Rick think it was wise to edge gently around the subject even if he wanted to shake the bastard until the information he needed came pouring out.

“Morty.” The Old Man answered. As if Rick had forgotten.

“Yeah, Morty,” Rick continued on, bolstered by the way the Old Man was absorbed in grinding the flipdons and fishing around in the glovebox. “You got a Morty of your own somewhere?”

“Don’t know.” The two words were delivered quick and sharp. Finite. Rick wanted to throttle him.

“ _You don’t know_?”

“Tha- _aaaugh_ -t’s what I fucking said,” the Old Man burped, tilting his head to shoot Rick a heavy glare.

“How do you _not know_?”

“Never bothered to check.”

“Why the fuck… you wouldn’t have to – _we_ wouldn’t have to live like such goddamn recluses if there was someone around who could _block our brainwaves_.”

“Not interested.”

“Not – not _interested_? _Seriously_ , Old Man?”

His answer was a wet sounding burp. Rick scoffed while he navigated them through a space station graveyard, dodging broken metal hulls and sparkling balloon bursts of shattered plexiglass.

But Rick wasn’t _blind_. He didn’t miss the way the Old Man turned to catch him in one long, calculative stare and Rick very purposely set his face into a concentrated grimace, acting like he didn’t notice the not-so-subtle evaluating glare. Whatever was up the Old Man’s ass, he wasn’t _lying_ – but Rick could taste the bitter edge of something left unsaid.

“So what – you’re fine with just living on that fucking moon _forever_?”

“Ugh, teenagers are so fucking dramatic,” the Old Man grumbled, turning back to his lap where dexterous fingers started packing the fine powder of dried slugs into a glass pipe. “Not _forever_. The Feds’ll lose interest in a couple years.”

“ _A couple years_? No. _Hard_ no, I – I’m not waiting until I’m as old as you to go see the fucking universe.”

“You’ll wait as long as I fucking tell you,” the Old Man grit out, voice as brittle-sharp as lake ice cracking under foot.

And because Rick was starting to see the shape of his own idea forming in his head (and getting hit when he already had healing bruises _sucked_ ) he left it at that. It was pointless to argue with the bastard, especially when he pulled a lighter out and sucked in a deep inhale of burning slug. The cabin filled with the tacky smell of wet earth and spoiled potatoes and then the Old Man was sinking into the upholstery like all his bones had melted.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Rick grumbled to himself under his breath.

The grating metallic screech of the bay door opening jolted Rick out of unconsciousness. The room was dark, Shmlaron totally eclipsed in darkness except for one thin purple sliver, and Rick was cold – why was he practically bare-ass naked and curled up on the floor? Why did his head hurt? He shifted and felt the pull of his wrists, metal clanking as a padlock knocked against his cuffs.

Right. The Old Man. A socket wrench. Handcuffs. Fuck. Did he have a concussion? Probably.

The purring hum of a _very_ familiar engine had Rick clenching his teeth so hard he momentarily forgot about the throbbing of his head until it slammed back exponentially worse. But Rick fought the urge to curl in on himself, awkwardly shuffling until he was upright, holding back another wave of sickness with fury alone.

That bastard had _taken Rick’s ship._

Even Rick – the one who had loving handcrafted the thing together - had never flown the ship alone. The Old Man didn’t allow it. And a joyride wasn’t worth a fight when the Feds had a thirty percent chance of nabbing Rick as soon as he got out of range of the brainwave blocker. Luckily the Old Man never expressed an interest in the ship unless he was bossing Rick into the driver’s seat for a quick supplies run or drop-off so Rick’s possessiveness was slightly culled.

But if the ship was running on the other side of the door to the hangar – if that dull thud resounding off the landing bay meant what Rick _thought_ it meant – it was yet another unspoken agreement broken.

Rick’s heart started to pound, a furious drumbeat that intensified his headache and made his numb arms throb. His vision was bleeding with red by the time the door to the hangar slid open and the Old Man stumbled into view, catching himself against the doorway and swaying in place. Rick felt a new form of wrath bloom hot and electric in his chest with the thought that the bastard hadn’t just taken his ship out - he’d taken it out while he was _utterly smashed_.

“ _Where the_ fuck _have you been_ ,” Rick snarled, his voice almost as raspy as the Old Man’s for how dry his mouth was, but the pain in his head came second to the indignation boiling him alive.

When the Old Man snapped his eyes open, they were guarded. Cold in a way that almost tempered some of Rick’s rage. He raked them over Rick in one long pan and hummed a non-committal sigh.

“So you’re awake,” the Old Man grunted, his steps slow and uneven when he paced towards his work desk, his eyes sliding away from Rick like water over stone. Like Rick wasn’t worth his notice. Like bleeding and concussed and chained to the floor was a totally normal and acceptable way to find him.

“Does that surprise you, asshole?” Rick barked, or at least he tried to. The shape of his words were meant to be sharp but his voice came out a harsh rasp that scratched all the way up his esophagus. He cleared his throat and realized how badly he wished he could wet it. He shifted his arms and the metal padlock connecting his cuffs to the floor clanked loudly. “You coulda put me in the medical pod, at least.”

The unimpressed glance the Old Man shot him gave away nothing of his thoughts and the silence was heavy until one time-worn hand landed on the stool in front of the desk and dragged it towards Rick. The squeal of metal legs against metal flooring made white sparks pop on the back of Rick’s eyelids and his head gave an inconvenient pulse of agony.

“ _Jeezus fucking_ -”

“Kneel.”

Rick snapped his jaw closed at the hard edged command, a thin dribble of trepidation sliding down his bare arms and raising goosebumps in its wake. The Old Man spun the chair with a wobbly flourish, shoving it forward until the front legs were close enough to prod at Rick’s feet.

“Go fuck yourself,” Rick rasped, spitting a pathetically dry wad of bloody, bile-y spit onto the floor and glaring as best he could with one eye, the furious tilt of his eyebrow making his swollen face throb.

The Old Man blinked once - slowly and vaguely irked-looking even if his two eyes didn’t coordinate when they closed - leaning his weight heavily on the stool while he looked down his nose at Rick. “Kneel. Or – _uuuuoghh_ – or you’ll stay there all night.”

Rick was stubborn – stubborn enough to consider telling the Old Man to go fuck himself just to prove he wasn’t someone to be bossed around – and he might have spat another globule of blood at the old bastard if it weren’t for the fact that his head hurt more than it ever had in his life. Worse than the hangover he’d gotten on Bylantium scotch, worse than the time a bum tried to brain him with a cinderblock for jumping into an occupied train car, worse than the time the Old Man shot a portal right under him and he dropped ten feet onto solid concrete.

Begrudgingly – and scowling like mad the whole time – Rick shifted, bracing himself with his bound hands against the floor and awkwardly shuffling his legs underneath him. The pull of the cuffs strained his shoulders and he had to spread his bent knees wide to lessen the tension in his arms and he hated the Old Man all anew for trying to make him feel small.

The Old Man’s neutral grimace was unchanged at Rick obedience but once Rick was settled, he pushed the stool forward until the front legs bumped against Rick’s spread thighs and the edge of the seat crowded Rick’s chest. Rick could see where things were going so it didn’t surprise him at all when the Old Man straddled the seat like he was getting on a horse, nearly overbalancing before his khaki-covered crotch landed very near Rick’s face.

Rough fingers caught up Rick’s chin and forced his head back, crystalline blue meeting crystalline blue. But there was nothing but whiskey stirring under that clear water – none of the usual rage or the barest hint of triumph at watching Rick submit. Only an unfocused sort of stare – like the Old Man was looking _through_ him - and Rick loathed him like he had never known loathing before.

Rick leaned away, a vain attempt to pull out of the Old Man’s hold, but the grip was too tight, blunt finger nails digging cruelly into Rick’s swollen cheek at the movement.

The Old Man’s gaze refocused, apparently with great effort, and Rick felt another sluice of trepidation race down his back at the vague disappointment he saw dragging down the crow’s feet at the corners of the Old Man’s eyes.

“Jeezus, you’re fucking hideous,” the Old Man grumbled, turning Rick’s face back and forth, seemingly inspecting the damage.

“Guess that makes two of us,” Rick grit out between his teeth. The fingers around his chin tightened.

“I sho- _ooough-_ ulda fucking known…” the Old Man grumbled and a taste of whiskey and old-man stress sweat hit Rick’s tongue past the dull copper of his own blood still lingering in his mouth.

“Shoulda known _what_?” Rick asked through grit teeth, trying to sound demanding when he didn’t dare unclench his jaw and let the Old Man hold his mouth open.

The Old Man rolled his eyes and sighed before he released Rick’s face, dropping his hand to unzip his pants and maneuver his half-flaccid cock out the open fly.

“If you bite me, I swear to fucking – _I’ll do worse than kill you_ , Dipshit. Got it?”

Rick had heard that threat a million times before but considering how badly his face still throbbed from its earlier meeting with a socket wrench, he didn’t doubt the words. On principle he refused to answer with anything more than a one-eyed glare.

But the Old Man understood. “Good,” he grunted, gripping a thick fistful of hair at the back of Rick’s head and dragging him forward.

They had done this – or some iteration of this – a million times before and Rick had been no stranger to sucking cock even before the Old Man. It was amazing the things you could get for a blow job – less than twenty minutes of work for the same amount of cash as a week of slaving away at a minimum wage job. Why would Rick wash dishes or deliver newspapers when the payout for a back-alley blow job was nearly a hundred fold and it got him off, besides?

And Rick was _good_ at it. Johns and truckers and guys he met at bars; his mouth was talented enough to make them babble, make them moan, make them plead with him for another round. ‘ _Stay the night?_ ’ ‘ _What about an extra thirty bucks?_ ’ ‘ _Will you be here next weekend?_ ’

Sucking dick stroked Rick’s ego. There was no better high than knowing he could make someone fall apart with just his tongue and it was safer than sex in a lot of ways because people tended to be more careful with someone whose teeth were so close to their junk.

Plus, Rick _liked_ giving head. He liked feeling a man’s thighs tremble under his hands and the sound of shuffling feet trying to stay steady and tasting the minute pulses of a cock about to burst across his tongue.

But blowing the Old Man was a chore. Keeping him hard while he constantly chugged down liquor was a challenge in and of itself and Rick had been forced on his knees for _hours_ before – mouth and jaw and tongue aching and then going numb while the Old Man guided Rick’s head over his lap like a ragdoll. 

The salty tang in his mouth was bitter like musky flesh – like the Old Man had gone a day or two too long without a shower – and even though the soft skin was hardening against his palate, a quick glance up to the man in question made Rick wonder if he even _enjoyed_ forcing his way down Rick’s throat.

The Old Man was glowering down at him. Not _heatedly_ glowering down at him in the way that could set Rick on fire. The flat line of the Old Man’s eyebrow and the blank stare of his gaze screamed _drunken boredom_ like Rick didn’t give the best suck jobs on _either_ side of the Mississippi.

So a task that should have been at least partially turning Rick on was dialed back to a low simmer. The concussion probably didn’t help matters any, either. Still, it was hard not to feel a _slight_ stirring at the way the Old Man made the whole thing more _violent_ than it needed to be – and just a touch of violence always rang Rick’s fucking bell. The hard sting of his hair getting pulled and the prodding at the back of his throat were enough to make his cock pulse against his thigh but the absolute unresponsiveness of the man above him constantly fought to hedge his arousal.

Sucking the Old Man off was _tedious_.

“Keep it up,” the Old Man commanded, loosening his hold on Rick’s hair. More than once Rick wondered if the Old Man’s fascination with pulling his hair was a psychosomatic obsession with his own bald spot - gnarled fingers always migrating to the same place that was bare on the Old Man’s skull to yank Rick in - and in a passing sort of way Rick thought he might be destined to lose the hair there prematurely now thanks to the Old Man’s strange, specific habit.

Above him, the Old Man dipped his hand into his lab coat pocket once his fingers slid from Rick’s hair and Rick moaned some kind of assent, pulling back enough to take a longer breath and refill his slightly straining lungs, disguising the moment by swirling his tongue over the head of the Old Man’s dick and licking at the salty slit.

Peripherally, Rick watched the Old Man pull out a mostly full bottle of dark liquor from his pocket and take three long chugs while Rick bobbed over his cock, saliva and blood mixing to darken the khaki fabric around the Old Man’s zipper.

Stretching his jaw to accommodate the Old Man’s girth added a new, constant pounding to the headache pulsing dry and never-ending behind Rick’s eyes and his split lip strained at the abusive stretch. Desperate to get things over with as quickly as possible, Rick pulled out all his best moves, lamenting the handicap of working without his hands though that was hardly a new challenge.

He took the Old Man deep, his nose buried in musky slacks, and swallowed around the intrusion in his throat. The pressure made his one good eye water but the Old Man coughed on his swallow of booze and Rick took that as a compliment. He hummed, the sound low and muffled with his mouth stuffed full, laving his tongue along the thick vein on the underside of the Old Man’s dick.

But that spark of hope that maybe Rick’s work would be kept quick and easy faded, the cock weighing down his tongue losing its heft as it softened slightly. Not enough that the Old Man yanked him off – the bastard never gave up unless he passed out wasted – but enough that Rick stopped trying so hard, loosening his mouth and leaning into the hand that returned to the same place on the back of Rick’s head to fist his hair, manually operating him up and down.

Watching the same swath of khaki rock in front of his face started to make Rick nauseous after a few minutes so he closed his eyes and willed his stomach to settle. Puking all over the Old Man’s lap wasn’t going to get this over with any sooner.

Fuck, Rick wanted a cigarette – his hands itched to hold the filter between his fingers, lungs yearning for a taste of smoke. He’d also settle for a more interesting dick in his mouth – one attached to someone responsive enough to make the labor of giving head worthwhile.

That boy flashed behind Rick’s closed eyelids. Morty. Small and lithe and so expressive. Rick bet the kid had never gotten a blow job in his life and blood raced to Rick’s cock at the thought of being the first to taste him. A pent-up teenager like Morty would pop like a rocket if Rick put his mouth anywhere near his dick, probably quiver in embarrassment afterwards, flushed and desperate. The groan Rick breathed around the semi-hard dick in his mouth was only partially to urge the Old Man to a faster release. Rick was too busy imagining the cock sliding along his tongue was Morty’s, two huge brown eyes watching him work in reverence.

Imagining Morty’s sex-face triggered something – a little glimmer of memory, a spark in the darkness beyond Rick’s probable concussion - and Rick scrunched his eyes closed, concentrating past the pain.

A daydream. Rick’s sexual fantasies circled the kid practically from the moment he laid eyes on him but they were only brief and passing. He was too busy tinkering with his ship and keeping half an eye on the Old Man while he was out of his mind on flipdons, the possibility he might get it into his head to build another neutrino bomb ever-present.

So even though he’d played out the memory of the trade on Io in his head on repeat and vacantly wondered what kind of porn Morty looked at – Rick’s hands greasing engine parts and retightened the ever-loosening screws of the brainwave detector on autopilot - he hadn’t spent any notable brain cells on the fantasy – not until…

Rick remembered laying on the mattress, the memory foggy at first but getting clearer the more he forced himself to concentrate past the pain of his head and his stretched jaw and the intrusion nudging against his throat in rhythmic thrusts. Before things went to hell, he was stretched out in bed, part of his attention on watching the Old Man crouch over his work desk, shaking hands detangling a nest of wires, fingers still shockingly dexterous despite the trembling as they unwound a snarl of copper. But the Old Man was only of periphery notice to Rick – monitoring him for mood swings or erratic behavior was second nature. The majority of Rick’s focus was directed at the phone he held over his face, eyes scanning page after page after page. Searching. _Searching._

Secure networks scrolled by under his fingers - referencing, cross-referencing, hacking into the Social Security Administration and the IRS, following the scant trail of breadcrumbs Rick had to follow.

It was embarrassingly easy. Even though Rick had been in the future for long enough for it to become his _present_ , there were some things he still couldn’t take for granite – cell phones and the internet being the biggest contenders right behind his beloved ship. Everything he could ever need to know was _right there_ at the tip of his fingers – like fucking magic but better because it was _science_. How did idiots still exist when all the information in the _multiverse_ was right there inside something that could fit his pocket?

In 1969, the process of hunting down someone with almost no information to work off of would have been excruciatingly boring. Rick would have to do some actual leg-work – get off his ass and ask around, do some breaking and entering, exchange a few bribes, _get a fucking library card_. Ugh.

But with his cell phone in hand, Rick didn’t even have to put on a shirt to find out _everything_ he could ever need to know and more. He hit the information jackpot while he was comfortably reclined against the two flattened pillows, the mess of wires the Old Man was fucking around with setting off sparks that lifted the hair on Rick’s arms as the room filled with electric charge.

A birth certificate. Beth Sanchez. The mysterious daughter only mentioned when the Old Man was blackout drunk and even then, only in passing. He hadn’t signed the birth certificate – unsurprising: the bastard was paranoid - but Rick found it all the same and the path to the boy with the bright eyes suddenly became miles shorter. He followed Beth Sanchez to a marriage license and a new last name – _Smith_.

_Morty Smith_. That was the boy’s name. Rick turned it over in his head, eyes drifting momentarily away from his phone to stare blankly through the metal ceiling trying to close lightyears of space. 

When Rick ripped himself out of his absent drifting, he scoured the IRS for Beth Smith’s most recent tax forms and it was there, right at the top of the pilfered pdf. A home address.

Rick ignored the weird lurch in his stomach when he saw that the address was in the very same hometown he had fought so hard to get out of. The Smiths lived on a street he’d never heard of – one that probably hadn’t existed in 1969 – but the city and state were the same hated stomping grounds in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere America.

With great effort, Rick unclenched his jaw, more resolved than ever. No one deserved to grow up in that shit-hole. And pulling Morty from borings-ville USA and showing him the endless wonders of the universe would _blow his mind_ – Rick would be his goddamn hero, his _savior_ , the best fucking thing to ever happen to the kid – and Rick wasn’t opposed to a bit of worshipping.

He smirked, imagining those eyes lighting up for him.

True, this one was a different Morty than the one he’d glimpsed on Io. He was the _Old Man’s_ Morty which was in some ways unfortunate because everything that bastard touched turned to trash. But Rick could forgive Morty his relation when that was the closest _Rick_ would ever get to having one of his own considering any nebulous plans to procreate had been smashed flat by living with the Old Man – not that he had the patience to wait fifty years even if he _could_ stomach the thought of reproducing. Plus, the geezer had been absent in his daughter’s life for longer than Morty had been alive so he was untouched – a clean slate, so to speak - no Grandpa hanging out in his memories to fuck things up for Rick. Because Rick was greedy and horny and he’d never been good at sharing.

Feeling so close to success he could taste it, Rick swiped over to social media, determined to get a taste of immediate gratification.

With a last name so common, his searches pulled up too many results and Rick spent a stupid amount of time filtering through faces, growing more and more convinced the kid didn’t have an internet presence – at least not on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or Twitter like every other young person from the new millennium. And yeah Rick could probably find his fucking _reddit account_ or whatever but Rick didn’t want to know the kid’s opinion on videogames or what he did or didn’t consider an asshole move – he wanted to get another hit from those bottomless eyes.

After thirty minutes, Rick finally found something of note. An Instagram profile of a red-headed teenage girl. He almost scrolled past her but there was something about her brown eyes that had him slide his finger back up to do a double-take. They weren’t _exactly_ the same as Morty’s – they didn’t reach through the phone screen to wrap a fist around his heart – but he pulled her profile up and after swiping past nearly a hundred cliché selfies and photographs of food, he found what he was looking for in the background of a picture taken at a beach on the fourth of July.

The girl - _Summer Smith_ Rick reminded himself carefully in his head – was decked out in a stars and stripes bikini, big sunglasses covering her eyes. She was carefully posed, leaned back and twisted at the waist at just the right angle to accentuate her flat stomach and curved breasts. Rick’s eyes swept over her critically. She was pretty but in a very ordinary way. He’d fuck her if she offered but the vain way she was sucking in her cheeks to emphasize her cheekbones turned him off a little. In Rick’s experience, people who cared too much what they looked like made lousy lays – they had too hard a time letting go.

So Rick’s attention slid from decent, very visible cleavage to the small figure behind her.

Morty was awkwardly curled in on himself, sitting on a beach towel next to his sister and hugging his knees to his chest, squinting at the glare of the sunlight as he stared out at the water. 

He was shirtless in the picture, his shoulders and arms just starting to turn pink with sunburn, and Rick was hit with a wave of arousal so incompatible with the vanilla-as-fuck image he might have been embarrassed if he were physically capable of feeling shame. Morty’s scrawny back and skinny arms shouldn’t light a fire in the pit of Rick’s stomach – even Summer was objectively better looking than he was – but there was something about how _bully-able_ he looked; how weak and fragile and small – that made Rick want to pin him down in the sand and run his tongue over sun-warmed skin.

His expression only added to Rick’s fantasy. He looked disgruntled and stiff – bored and uncomfortable – and despite being surrounded by laughing faces on a crowded beach, he seemed apart from it all.

_Isolated_. The word popped into Rick’s head like a bloated corpse rising from the depths of a black sea. And that loneliness called to Rick like a fucking siren song. In Rick’s experience, _lonely_ people made _excellent_ lays. Desperate to please, touch starved, and clingy. That was _exactly_ the flavor Rick craved.

Rick shifted, adjusting himself through his jeans and rubbing himself with the heel of his palm to take some of the edge off. Morty’s skin was so _pink_ and smooth and unmarked. The kid was obviously a virgin - Rick could tell from the way he curved his shirtless shoulders in like he was humiliated to find himself undressed – and Rick wanted so badly to sink his teeth into that untouched flesh he nearly bit through his own tongue.

With another half-glance towards the Old Man – he had pulled out a blow torch while Rick was distracted and was welding something together in the far corner of the room, the smell of hot metal clogging Rick’s nostrils – Rick spread his thighs and unbuttoned his jeans, licking a fat stripe over the palm of his hand and reaching into his pants to fist himself.

A kid like Morty, Rick bet he’d like a bit of roughhousing. With nothing but a sister, he was probably starved for an older guy’s attention. And Rick could be just the guy to give him that because he had an _address_ now, thank you Beth Smith - horse surgeon, mother, and responsible tax-payer. Rick could _find_ Morty, could hop in his ship right now and fly off to earth - okay not _right now_ , the Old Man would lose his shit if Rick tried to leave, especially since the bastard had been steadily working his way through as many bottles of booze as he could unearth in their ransacked apartment.

But that was too real and too easily ignored with his hand on his cock stroking harshly under denim. Because a plan was already half forming itself in his mind.

The Old Man had to fall asleep eventually – and the more liquor he slogged down his gullet, the harder he’d be out when his body finally blue-screened and he crumpled onto the mattress. Once he was dead to the world, Rick could take the ship to earth and pick up the kid. A quick trip like that, odds were good the Feds wouldn’t notice his lone brainwaves making a break for it and besides, once he had Morty, he’d be _untraceable_ to them.

The Old Man would be a little harder to shake but with Morty in tow, Rick could go _anywhere_. They could hide out in the heart of Federation space – safe under Gromflomite mandibles where the Old Man wouldn’t dare come find them – which would buy them enough time for Rick to figure out portal technology. And once he did, he’d have a million new experiences to give Morty; a million things to teach him and show him and tell him about. And maybe then it wouldn’t be _Rick_ getting fucked by an Old Man who treated sex like a punishment for the both of them. It would be _Morty_ under Rick, squirming and begging for more.

An image of Morty flushed and sweaty and cuffed – not to keep him from throwing a punch but to keep him from wrapping a hand around his own cock and coming too soon while Rick rocked into him slow but unrelenting – flickered so vibrantly behind Rick’s closed eyes he groaned, the sound lost to the windy fuzz of the blow torch. What would this Morty’s face look like screwed up in pleasure? Would he flush as dark as the boy on the stairs did? What sort of noises would he make when Rick pushed him to the edge over and over again but held him back from falling?

Rick’s eyes tracked to Morty’s lips – pink and flush and set in a pout. Rick wanted to lick those lips, bite them until they were swollen, pry them apart and feel the ridges of his molars. With a mouth like that, Rick bet he’d be noisy – _zero_ filter for the sounds Rick would pull out of him because he’d never made them before - and Rick was dying to hear him scream. Not in pain – Rick grimaced at the thought. No, he didn’t want the kid hurt or bruised. Didn’t want to have to look at any marks he’d made with his own fists while he fucked him, the kid was too soft for that messed up shit. Rick wanted him pliant and conceding and mewling below him – helpless and _loving it_.

Rick would teach Morty to _beg_ for those cuffs, to beg for Rick to take control, to wind him up so high he’d _cry_. Rick bet the kid was fucking gorgeous when he cried.

Rick snapped back to his painful present when the Old Man thrust forward unexpectedly roughly, the head of his cock nudging the back of Rick’s throat and nearly startling a gag reflex into motion, but Rick was a pro and he coughed away the discomfort around the intrusion in his mouth and warily observed the way the Old Man’s weight kept tipping around on the stool as he drunkenly tried to hold himself up.

Okay, so the last clear thing Rick remembered was jerking himself off to a pathetically tame picture of Morty. The irony of including the cuffs in his fantasy while Rick was currently bound and very much _hating them_ wasn’t lost on him but his dick wanted what it wanted and who was he to tell it no?

But that was only one more shattered fragment – what happened next?

He was pretty sure he didn’t get to cum. The blurry memory struggled to come into focus but he didn’t remember washing away his own spunk in the sink or the wave of emotional withdrawal that had at some point become routine after getting off. No, the Old Man interrupted before Rick had a chance to finish – a loud clatter and the harsh silence of the blowtorch turning off. A string of curses and… a fire? That explained why the room had that hazy veneer turning the beams of lights into streaks of pale grey – good to know it wasn’t brain damage or eye-trauma. He couldn’t smell the smoke past the blood clogging his own nose or else time had killed some of the worst of the odor but the particles still hovered in the air.

At the disconcerting sight of flickering orange light bouncing off metal wall, Rick dropped his phone on the mattress, tripped over the assorted collection of tools and garbage littering the floor, and rushed over with a plasma fire extinguisher, pants still unbuttoned and hand slick with spit and precum. The Old Man was trying to knock something out of the blaze, too drunk and stupid to realize sticking his hand in an open flame wasn’t the best way to handle the situation, and Rick had to heft him around the waist and shove him away to get him to stop, pointing him towards the mattress when the bastard wobbled and nearly crashed face first onto the desk currently hosting a fire.

“Get the – lay the fuck down, Old Man, before you cook us alive!” The air in the moon apartment was more oxygen rich than the air on earth and the possibility of lighting the whole place up like a crematorium oven was higher than it should have been. Rick had been meaning to build a sprinkler system but his ship and his tentative attempts at portal technology had taken priority and installing fucking _safety measures_ in the moon apartment felt too much like settling in.

He put the fire out before it caught too many of the notes tacked up on the wall. The plasma evaporated on contact with heat so there wasn’t much to clean up. The source of the fire was a charred up rag – one probably soaked with jeezus-knows-what and set down too close to the rain of sparks falling off the metal hull as the Old Man soldered two pieces of steel together.

“Would if kill you to have some fucking self-awareness,” Rick snapped, twisting the dial on the gas tanks to off and leaning over to pick the blowtorch up off the ground where the Old Man had dropped it.

“What – was’got you all hot and bothered?” Rick distantly heard the Old Man grumble from the other side of the room but he was too busy collecting the smattering of papers - the _very flammable paper_ – the idiot had left way too near his work area. The guy was a lab-accident waiting to happen – how had he survived to the ancient age of whatever-the-fuck he was on his own?

“ _The fucking fire_ , asshole, _obviously._ No more – you’re done with the blow torch until you sober up, I’m – I’m calling it,” Rick commanded, dropping the handful of papers and the fire extinguisher pell-mell onto the floor a safe distance away from the still slightly smoldering metal and wiping his hands off on his jeans. He should probably wash them before he went back to touching his dick. He wasn’t sure what plasma exposure would do to it but he didn’t really want to find out.

“Ohhhhh, who’stha red-head?” the Old Man slurred, his tone biting and condescening.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Rick said as he turned, mind on the exhaust fan in the hangar and how long it would take to filter the smoke out if they kept the bay door open. The relief of seeing the Old Man actually planted on the mattress where Rick had ordered him dimmed when he realized the bastard was cradling Rick’s phone in both his hands. Something lurched in Rick’s stomach and he staggered forward intending to swipe his phone back – thank _fuck_ the old man was too drunk to realize what he was looking at - but before Rick had put his bare foot down, the Old Man blinked and his face transformed, a wild, unfiltered expression of shock transforming him into someone foreign. “ _You found him_ ,” he breathed and the faintness of his voice hurt to hear.

For the first time since he’d been glued to the Old Man’s side, Rick watched something painful whisper across the face that would be his in the future. It was in the way blue eyes jumped to meet his with more rapt attention, the slight drop of his bottom lip, the eyebrow climbing its way up his forehead. It should have been a triumph to see something – _anything_ – that wasn’t anger play across those hatedly aged features but instead Rick’s stomach dropped out of him and hurtled through empty space.

Rick couldn’t stand to look at it – that rawness on the Old Man’s face was too vulnerable, was too much like shinning a light on all the things inside Rick he’d rather leave in the dark – so he paced to the worktable and sat down, sliding open the drawer and fishing out all the jeweler’s screwdrivers he could find in the mess of tangled tools.

“So this is him, huh?” The Old Man asked and Rick was grateful the geezer’s voice wasn’t that painful ghost of itself anymore, back to the rough, grousing tone Rick could handle. “My Morty.”

A thick rope of anger pulled Rick’s weightless stomach back from outer space and flooded it with noxious gas. He fought the instinct to spit out his ownership and dry-swallowed the ‘ _my_ Morty’ he so furiously wanted to bite out, but it lodged in his throat.

“Thought you weren’t interested in him.” It was a struggle for Rick to keep his voice level and he only partially succeeded.

“Why are _you_ interested in him?” the Old Man grit back, a little too quickly.

“Trying to avoid making _your_ mistakes,” Rick answered easily, pulling forward the micro-verse engine he’d been fine-tuning earlier while the Old Man downed an entire bottle of whiskey like he was trying to drown himself. “Is that a crime?”

“Ha,” the Old Man scoffed and Rick glanced up from his work in time to watch the geezer cover his face with his hands and dig his fingers into his eye sockets. When he spoke again it was muffled by his palms. “You’re fucking _lying_.”

The hair on Rick’s arm stood on end, kinetic energy smacking against his tongue like hot copper. He breathed deep through the anger fighting to rise up his throat and growled out, “ _What did you just say_?” his voice so near to the Old Man’s slightly deeper rasp that Rick frowned and glared down at the circuits on the desk.

“You – _you little shit_ , you think I don’t know what you were doing with this picture?” Rick looked up in time to see the Old Man brandish the phone with a flourish, the image of Morty and Summer flashing across the room. The thin gold wire Rick was tightening with a screwdriver snapped with a miniscule twang and Rick let his project drop from his hands, clattering to the desk. “You think I didn’t notice your unbuttoned pants and the smell of – of teenage hormones and precum?”

Rick held himself carefully still, locked in a glaring contest with the Old Man that he knew from experience _neither_ of them would win. His fucking phone – why the _fuck_ did he leave his phone out? He was stupider with his hand on his dick, sure, but the Old Man had never had a predilection for snooping before. Or maybe he _did_ and this was only the first time Rick was finding out about it.

“I keep telling you,” the Old Man finally broke their stare-off by sighing, eyes rolling to the ceiling with a lot less anger than Rick anticipated. That was probably related to the way he kept tilting to the side, the arm holding him up buckling under the weight of too much alcohol. He must have passed the constantly moving threshold between _drunk-and-angry_ and _too-drunk-to-be-angry_ which boded well for the possibility that he was in a blackout _._ “I know every fuckin’ thought in your head.”

“Yeah. Because _you_ had ‘em first,” Rick parroted back in a whiny, completely inaccurate imitation of the Old Man’s voice considering they already nearly sounded the same. “You keep – you know I keep hearing that somewhere,” he bit out sarcastically. Then the words he himself had just said blinked into focus, realization twining around his guts like a python and _squeezing_. “So,” he continued, black bile sliding up his throat, “how long have you been wanting to fuck your grandkid, Old-Timer?”

The Old Man laughed at that, a surprising burst of noise with more honesty in it than Rick was used to hearing from the bastard. And when his chuckles slowed down and the Old Man asked, “You should – what did it take to spark _your_ interest?” he didn’t sound _mad_ , he almost sounded _relieved._ Trepidation danced hot and electric over Rick’s skin. “What was it - a quick peek across a dirty subway station? A few stuttered sentences? One helpless glance from those _big brown eyes_?”

And Rick hated it, hated the Old Man all anew for seeing straight through him.

“We’re suckers – the both of us,” the Old Man breathed out on a sigh, the inebriation clearing from his eyes for a fraction of a second to sweep Rick in an x-ray stare. Then he blinked and canted over, loose-limbed while he fishing around in the junk next to the mattress and uncovered an almost empty bottle of scotch.

Rick wasn’t entirely sure what his face was doing – he was trying his hardest to keep it neutral and flat but he couldn’t unclench his teeth or his fists. “You don’t have to look so embarrassed,” the Old Man chuckled, another uncharacteristic laugh lifting the hair on the back of Rick’s neck. The Old Man tilted the bottle back and took three swallows, ending on a loud, wet burp. Rick watched his adam’s apple bob and the thin line of his throat flex before he tossed the empty bottle into the sheets and collapsed backwards, laying spread eagle. “I remember the first one I saw too, _years_ ago. Jeezus, he was just a kid with eyes too big for his face and a hand fisted in his Rick’s lab coat.”

The Old Man unashamedly shoved a hand down his pants and adjusted himself, an unmistakable bulge tenting the fabric of his slacks. “ _Fuck_ ,” he breathed in the same tone of voice Rick used when he was in the throes of pleasure, a heady exhalation he’d never heard from the Old Man, not even when the bastard was balls deep in his ass. “And you – you’re a walking, talking erection so that one on Io musta really done a number on you, huh. I shoulda fuckin’ known.”

Rick let the swath of new information sink in, his brain working overtime to process the most honest statements the Old Man had ever admitted to. All that shit about not being interested in his own Morty – that had been bullshit. He was obviously _very_ interested in Morty – but he was ripe for the picking down on earth.

“I don’t get it, Old Man,” Rick eventually hedged, his forehead furrowed in a scowl. “You’re telling me you’ve been thinking about this kid – _wanting this kid_ \- for _how long_?”

The Old Man grumbled non-committally and waved a loose-wristed hand in the air like he was trying to swat Rick’s words away.

“Why not _do_ something about it?”

“What?”

“Why – it’s not like he’s – he’s not a fucking _Zylantium diamond_. He’s not surrounded by armed guards and heat detecting lasers and – and neuron canceling rays,” Rick grit out, a strange misplaced anger making his voice derisive. Why hold back? Why not just _take_? What kind of cowardly bullshit kept the Old Man from the one thing that even just _talking about_ put him in the best mood Rick had ever seen? “He’s a _kid_ and you’re a _Rick_. What’s been standing in your fucking way?”

The Old Man tilted his head up to give Rick a thousand-yard stare, his eyes wildly unfocused from an entire day of binge drinking. “You little psycho, _of course_ you’d look at it like that,” he scoffed, collapsing back against the mattress. “What I wanted was to _spare him_. Leave him outta all this bullshit.”

So the Old Man had a smidgeon of self-awareness in him somewhere, after all. Enough to know life with him was something worth _sparing_ people from. But since when did the bastard care about anyone but himself?

The Old Man was quiet for a long time - long enough that Rick was half-sure he’d passed out – but he roused himself enough to grumble, “He’s not like us. He deserves something better,” in a sleepy, alcohol thick rasp.

Rick couldn’t agree more. Morty _did_ deserve something better. He deserved _Rick_ – not some nasty Old Man with droopy balls and a chip on his shoulder the size of the Milky Way.

But now the Old Man _knew_ Rick had an interest. Luckily he was too drunk to think deeply about anything at the moment but the possibility that he would sober up and try to stop Rick – that he might work out Rick’s tentative plan of escape because he _always_ fucking did – was too real a threat for Rick to ignore.

Luckily Rick wasn’t the type to patiently wait for the perfect time for _anything_ because he had to move _now_. Now while the Old Man was plastered enough that he hadn’t put together that _Rick_ would never be content to hold off from something that he wanted just for the – _what?_ – the _moral ramifications_? Fuck that.

Rick made quick work of refitting all the parts back into his micro-verse engine, hands sliding over clean silver circuits practically on autopilot while his eyes kept darting up to keep an eye on the Old Man. He lay motionless and limp, his loud, rasping snores eventually fading when he snuffled once and turned to bury his face in the pillow.

Engine put back together, Rick padded gently around the room on bare feet, finding a shirt amongst the collected clutter and tugging it on. He sat on the floor to lace up his boots and then stood over the mattress to stare angrily at the portal gun poking out of the Old Man’s pocket. Taking it would slow the Old Man’s eventual pursuit, would promise Rick could go _anywhere_ at the drop of a hat – but the Old Man could build another and probably track the first one down besides. And stealing his portal gun was a surefire way to guarantee the bastard would _never_ leave Rick alone – he’d hunt him down to the ends of the multiverse just to torture him, just to _prove a point_.

In the end he decided to leave it behind. The Old Man’s sleep patterns were erratic and who knew if picking his pockets would wake him up.

It was when he paced back to the work desk to grab the mircro-verse – when he momentarily turned his back on the mattress and the Old Man and let a glimmering spark of excitement scoop out his insides with the thought of how soon he’d be knocking on that Morty’s door – that the Old Man must have struck.

Rick hadn’t even seen him coming, had barely enough time to register the pain and spin around to watch the socket wrench raise again and then all he knew was blackness.

Throat deep on the Old Man, Rick blinked his eyes open, the vertigo-inducing sight of khaki crowding his vision a little better than the remembered nothingness of head trauma.

The Old Man lost his balance again – the backless stool too much for him to handle when he was so drunk – and this time he didn’t manage to catch himself before he toppled all the way to the floor. His dick had popped out of Rick’s mouth on his backwards decent and Rick grimaced at the crash that reverberated in his tender skull. Whatever bottle the Old Man had been drinking from shattered on the metal floor and Rick’s knees were hit with a wet splash and a spray of broken glass. The Old Man’s flailing kicked the stool over so when the bastard landed sprawled out in front of Rick, elbow pressed to a puddle of booze and broken glass, they were very nearly eye-to-eye.

“Jeezus, give it up, Old Man,” Rick groaned, rotating his jaw and gritting his teeth to give his stretched mouth some variety. “You’re fucking blitzed and I’m – I’m _concussed –_ thanks so much for that, by the way - so can’t this power trip of yours wait?”

The Old Man glared at Rick unevenly somehow still clinging to his dignity even though he was struggling to prop himself up, glass crunching under his palm.

“Abo- _ooough-_ ut that,” the Old Man grunted, his head tilting on his neck to rest on his shoulder. “I knew the second I passed out you’d go and – you’d be off to get the kid or whatever.” Rick swallowed – of _course_ the bastard would guess his plan. “Probably – what? Grab Morty and hit up Fed – Fed- _eeeeughi-_ eration territory?” _Fuck_. “And I figured I’d spare myself the headache –”

“- By bashing _my_ head in with a socket wrench?” Rick cut him off indignantly, _furious_ he’d been so easy to read.

The Old Man’s eyes narrowed. Not quite a wince but something similar. “I was drunk and yeah, sure, it wasn’t the – _uuugh_ – the most _nuanced_ of plans but it fucking worked, didn’t it?” He sniffed and wiped at his wet lower lip with the back of his wrist, his face a little too flushed and loose to pull off disdainful. “I’m not gonna fucking _apologize_ to a would-be kidnapper.”

Rick’s scowl pulled at his split lip. “A would-be _what_?”

“You – jeezus christ how was I ever so fucking stupid?” The Old Man was in his element – telling Rick off, and even though he wasn’t slurring, Rick could tell from the unfocused gleam of his eyes he was barely holding himself up. “You can’t just _grab_ the kid like he’s a stray dog you pick up at the pound – not – no- _ooough_ -t if you want what you saw on Io. The kid has a family and a life and he’s not gonna like getting yanked the fuck out of it unless he trusts you first.”

That was a shockingly valid point – one Rick hadn’t considered at all – and Rick bristled at the too-knowing look the Old Man was blearily pegging him with.

Go to earth, grab the kid, get the fuck out of there. That had been Rick’s plan. But yeah, now it was pointed out, Rick could see how maybe _grab the kid_ might be a bit more complicated than a stranger landing a spaceship in his yard and saying ‘wanna fuck off into space with me?’

Then again, sub out ‘spaceship’ for ‘portal’ and the technique had worked on Rick. Besides, what the fuck else was he supposed to do?

“No – we – we- _eeeugh_ -ve gotta be _smart_ about it…” the Old Man continued on a thoughtful hum, trailing off and the breath in Rick’s lungs went sub-zero with permafreeze.

The ‘ _we_ ’ shouldn’t have been so startling – the Old Man was always blurring them together with the word – but it hit Rick over the head like another blow from that socket wrench. Rick tried to mask his shock, tried to let the simmering anger keep his face fixed in a swollen scowl, but something must have flickered in his eyes because the Old Man glanced at him, fished out his flask, and took a long sip.

“I’ve changed my mind about the whole ‘leave him out of it’ thing,” he said, disinterestedly picking bits of shiny broken glass off his hand. “Do- _ooough_ -n’t – don’t be _weird_ about it.”

Rick forced a scoff out his dry throat and bit back, “You know, _I’m you too_ , motherfucker. I knew you couldn’t hold the high ground forever,” while internally he spiraled.

The Old Man had a tendency to take the things Rick wanted for himself and destroy them but this Morty – the one who was so sad and lonely and lost without a Rick – wasn’t as expendable as the Deludian knife the Old Man had dulled by trying to stab through the bay door to prove a point or Rick’s hidden stash of Glimpo mushrooms he’d force fed Rick before leaving him bound and tripping through an overdose or even Rick’s precious ship he had to ruin by christening with the worst orgasm Rick had ever had.

The Old Man – the absolute bastard – he couldn’t touch Morty. He’d _break_ him.

An image popped into Rick’s head with brutal clarity: Morty naked and shivering and chained spread eagle across the metal floor. One uncomfortably large dildo nestled in his ass, another shoved down his throat and held there with a band of sloppily applied masking tape. Struggling to breathe and in pain. Left there for hours and hours – long enough to piss himself while waiting for the Old Man to wake up from his blacked out coma and practically choking to death on his own saliva. His perfect skin dotted with cigarette burns, little reminders of everything he’d ever done to piss of the Old Man.

_No_.

Morty wasn’t meant to be used like that, there’s no way he could handle it. He wouldn’t _bounce back_. He wouldn’t swallow all that simmering rage behind a wall of intent. He’d crumple up and perish, a wounded deer limping off into the woods to die alone.

Still, Rick’s cock pulsed traitorously against his thigh. If things were a little different, shifted just slightly to the left – if Morty was writhing in pleasure, if Rick was gentle and stretched him out before filling him to the fucking brim, if instead of collapsing onto the mattress and snoring like a fucking foghorn Rick leaned over Morty and watched him writhe in inescapable pleasure. If Morty _loved_ it – if he didn’t have to suffer through that cold slide of dread, if there wasn’t any of the _what if he doesn’t wake up what if he_ does _and is still furious what if he dies and then_ I _die and my corpse spends eternity speared from both ends_ – the image became so much less awful, creeping towards heart-stoppingly tantalizing.

But with the Old Man around, that bright spark of innocence in Morty that Rick so wanted to devour whole was destined to evaporate at the first unprepared fucking and Rick couldn’t stomach the thought of watching the light in his eyes dull.

“So what do _we_ do?” Rick asked around a lump in his throat, his one good eye focusing on the Old Man with the hyper-fixation of a laser beam.

The Old Man licked his lower lip, hazy eyes blowing out with more arousal than Rick had ever seen. “I’ll – I’ll go ‘ _apologize_ ’ to my daughter,” he said, voice low and raspy. “I scoped the place out,” Rick struggled with the urge to snarl but the Old Man was glassy-eyed and distant. “Subu- _uuugh-_ rban as fucking hell, by the way, but – shit – it’ll be _easy_ to move the pieces around. She – _Beth_ – her and her husband had a fight on the fucking lawn in the middle of the day so clearly things aren’t _great_.”

Rick mulled that nugget of information over thoughtfully in his head, probably picking apart _exactly_ the same things the Old Man saw. A broken family. The lonely kid from Summer’s photo. Morty would be _desperate_ for a friend.

“I’ll move in with the Smiths,” the Old Man said decisively, a hard edged smile lighting up his face. The sight of it made Rick’s head throb.

With his eyes still locked a million lightyears away on earth, the Old Man leaned forward, crawling towards Rick and palming the half-hard bulge still pulsing against Rick’s thigh. With a few sloppy, careless tugs, the Old Man yanked Rick’s boxers off, nearly falling over again in the process.

By now Rick would usually be trying to fight him off – more in the hope of landing one good kick for his ego’s sake than any real belief struggling would change the outcome – but with startling clarity, Rick realized what he needed to do and tried to mirror the Old Man’s atypical display of arousal

“What about Morty?” Rick asked, voice dark and sultry, not a hint of the furious rage he felt coloring his insides impossibly black. “What’ll you do about him?”

The Old Man chuckled, his distant stare a little wild when Rick spread his legs, letting the Old Man settle between his thighs. “I’ll be nice to him,” the Old Man breathed and Rick only barely managed to keep in his disbelieving scoff. _Nice_ was an impossibility for the Old Man and Rick knew that better than anyone. “I’ll – I’ll take him out on adventures and sit next to him on the couch and –” he broke off to dissolve into a round of truly upsetting chuckles, “- and fucking eat breakfast with him every morning.”

“ _Why_?” Rick demanded silky smooth and dangerous, watching the malicious grin dimple the old man’s cheeks while he furiously forced his damaged brain to take notes.

“So that when I sneak into his room, he won’t be scared until I press him down onto his stupid star-printed sheets,” the bastard admitted, pupils so wide Rick could see his own reflection in them. “S - so that Morty’ll know to call me ‘ _grandpa_ ’ when I sink into his virgin ass.”

“He’ll cry,” Rick told him, trying to keep his tone goading, watching with deep satisfaction as sparks lit up in the back of the Old Man’s eyes. “He’ll cry and he’ll scream. The kid’s a noisy one, you can tell just looking at him.”

The Old Man groaned out a ragged sound and thrust his hips against Rick, the hard bulge of him impressive considering how much liquor was circulating through his bloodstream.

“I’ll teach him to be quiet,” the Old Man practically purred and Rick valiantly ignored the spike of disgusted fury that wanted to rear its head. What a waste of such a beautiful quality. And Rick knew enough of what the Old Man considered _teaching_ to see bruises form on the face of the boy in Rick’s mind. But he shoved those thoughts down deep below a mask of heat. “I’ll teach him no one’ll help him if he screams.”

The Old Man struggled to stay up on his knees long enough to line himself up with Rick’s dry hole and Rick bit back a grimace, preparing himself for the pain, but before he was breached, the Old Man toppled, landing on Rick’s chest with a heady thump as their matching boney sternums collided.

“Ugh, _fuck_ ,” the Old Man cursed, bracing himself on either side of Rick and trying to push himself up but his arms were uncoordinated and he would up rolling over to lay beside Rick.

“Let me, Old Man,” Rick softly demanded, clanking the padlock on the cuffs against the metal floor for emphasis. “Uncuff me and I’ll ride you. Let me do all the work.”

It wasn’t often Rick actively expressed an interest in fucking the Old Man – and the times _Rick_ initiated had dropped significantly since they moved into the moon apartment and the Old Man all but ignored Rick’s pleasure – but it wasn’t out of character either. Early on, when things were still exciting and the Old Man wasn’t such a psychotic coward and the multiverse was their fucking oyster, Rick would get horny and desperate enough to ask for it. Whatever their sex might look like from the outside, cumming was cumming.

Rick could tell from the stare struggling to be penetrating that the Old Man was trying to read Rick – trying to find the truth hidden under his skin – so Rick buried every thought that wasn’t how traitorously horny the Old Man was making him. How desperately _he_ wanted to hold Morty down, pin him to his dorky bedsheets, and clap a hand over his mouth while he fucked into him slow and deep, his parents asleep in the next room.

If in his version Morty was desperate for it - begging for it, dragging Rick’s hand over his mouth himself so he wouldn’t wake his sleeping family – the Old Man didn’t need to know that.

“I’ll even call you _grandpa_ ,” Rick promised, his lips curling into a grin that made blood leak from his split lip.

Ultimately something must have shone through – a hint of something that pulled the Old Man’s paranoia to the forefront – because he squinted his eyes shut and said, “The cuffs stay on.” Then the Old Man shoved a hand in his pocket and unearthed a crowded key ring. He fiddled behind Rick for a long time – long enough for Rick to roll his eyes and barely bite back an aggravated huff – but eventually he heard the loud clank of metal on metal and his wrists were no longer being tugged to the floor.

The Old Man circled Rick’s bicep in a vice grip and leaned heavily on Rick while they both struggled to their feet. Rick did his best to avoid the glass shards but one bit into his heel, the immediate sting of alcohol in a fresh wound making him put his weight on his toes as he staggered to the mattress.

He wished his body wasn’t so stiff, wished his head wasn’t so clouded, wished the room wasn’t spinning so horribly with the change in altitude – he had to watch for an opening, _everything_ depended on it – but he was a fucking mess.

When the Old Man pushed Rick down onto springs and foam, his head jolted painfully. He closed his eyes against the hard throb, grounding himself with the slight bounce of the Old Man hitting the mattress next to him as he collapsed, trying his best not to start gagging up stomach acid.

“Go on then,” the Old Man slurred and Rick squinted his eyes open to take in the reclined form of the Old Man. He was palming himself - red, flushed cock poking out the fly of his khakis, breath already coming out in hot pants. “You think – how long before you think I can make Morty do all the work? He’d – hah – he’d be so _shy_ …”

Rick used the fiery bright image that painted on the back of his eyelids to help him ignore the agony of moving as he slowly shoved himself up to his knees. Morty on top – fuck – he hadn’t thought of that yet and it was painfully beautiful. Thin chested and red-faced and _embarrassed_. Fuck. He _wanted_ that. And he was going to fucking get it.

With his hands still cuffed behind his back, Rick rose above the old Man, testing the give of the chain between his wrists and surreptitiously rolling his shoulders. Slowly he eased a knee over the Old Man’s hips, gnarled hands grabbing for his thighs and sinking in like claws. “You’ve – you gotta guide it, grandpa,” Rick said speaking soft and gentle, tone higher than his normal register. The Old Man’s eyes went from half-mast to fully shut, another breathy pant – the likes of which Rick had _never_ heard from him before – escaping in a puff as he drifted fully into his fantasy.

Looking down on the older version of himself, Rick was struck suddenly with a wave of hyperawareness complacency had long ago robbed him of. The Old Man’s face was more heavily lined that it had been when Rick was nearly seventeen, the lab coat hanging looser on shoulders thinner than they used to be. Extensive drug use had made the skin under the Old Man’s eyes paper-y thin and Rick could see blue veins winding in the sunken hollows.

The Old Man had been deteriorating.

But Rick – Rick was in his _twenties_ now. Building the ship had made him stronger - lugging metal and holding up panes of glass had toned his arms and defined his stomach and strengthened his legs. He’d closed those last few inches between them years ago and his previously gangly, teenage shoulders had broadened.

The Old Man wasn’t weak – even falling apart he was smart and quick and deceptively sturdy – but Rick was younger and faster and stronger.

With as much cognitive focus as Rick could manage while his brain was trying to pound out of his skull, he noted the bulge in the Old Man’s lab coat pocket – the bastards favorite laser gun – and Rick shifted his knee slightly to clear the route to it.

The claws unhooked from Rick’s legs and the Old Man slid a hand between them to angle his cock up against Rick’s asshole. Rick sank onto it slightly, enough to sting the dry skin of his channel, but as a distraction method, it worked like a charm.

The Old Man’s eyes fluttered. “ _Morty_ ,” the Old Man breathed and the name was like a starting pistol.

Rick’s shoulders were sore from being forced behind him in the same position for so long but beyond the throbbing in his skull and the fury filling his throat with lava, it was easy to ignore the discomfort of twisting his arms up his back, his shoulders rolling in their sockets as he contorted until he was pulling his bound hands past the side of his head.

The Old Man had had a half-second to snap his eyes open and refocus them, a stupefied whisper of, “ _How the fuck did you do that_?” shooting Rick full of delayed adrenaline, all the sweeter for the delicious hint of shock widening the Old Man’s eyes.

“Guess you don’t know everything about me,” Rick drolled, wrapping one hand around the other and bringing it down _hard_ on the Old Man’s face. The Old Man’s nose crunched under the sides of his palms but this time Rick didn’t flinch. Instead he brought his hands down again harder, angling them so the metal around his wrists made contact with the Old Man’s teeth.

The Old Man spewed a fine mist of blood and grunted satisfyingly before Rick shoved a hand in his lab coat pocket and rolled out of reach, grasping the handgrip of the stolen gun and raising it level with the Old Man who was only midway turned over.

But to Rick’s belated shock, it wasn’t the expected laser pistol he found himself brandishing at the Old Man working himself up in a rage – it was the _portal gun_.

Of all the times Rick had lusted after the damn thing - of all the times he wished he had five minute to hold it and pick it apart with his eyes – of course it was _now_ that he finally had it in hand. Now that the Old Man was wrestling the gun Rick had been _hoping_ to grab from his other pocket, lifting it towards Rick’s face, a cruel chuckle flashing teeth stained with blood.

Rick’s finger tightened on instinct and _thank fuck_ for that. A portal opened between them and whatever blast the Old Man shot at him disappeared through the film of green particles instead of shooting a hole through his head. Things clattered, on the other side of the portal and Rick could only guess that the bastard had toppled over again.

“You stubborn piece of shit,” the bastard said, his voice lilting. “You couldn’t – I fucking _knew_ you’d wake up – we’re fucking cockroaches, the two of us. I shoulda hit you a few more times with that wrench.”

Rick blinked so hard it hurt his head. The Old Man – had the Old Man been trying to kill him?

The reality of the situation slammed into Rick like a freight train, the rushing blast of a horn shooting past him in the dark before fading away into shocking silence.

The Old Man had been trying to _kill him_.

Rick panted out one miserable stream of stolen breath that he refused to call a gasp because _why was he surprised_? The bastard beat him and fucked him dry and used him as a human ashtray when the mood struck him - which was often. Twice he watched Rick get stabbed without raising a hand to stop it and he’d shot him through the arm once in a blackout.

A shiver tried to race its way up Rick’s spine. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him – _why_ hadn’t it occurred to him? Rick desperately blamed his concussion and the murky shape of his thoughts for his unforgivable stupidity and the ache in his stomach that felt like _betrayal_ because _what the fuck_? After all their time together – after all the _shit_ Rick put up with – the Old Man thought he could just _kill him_?!

“You didn’t factor into my – you’d a fucked up things with Morty,” the Old Man continued and Rick could tell from the grunt in his voice he was trying to stumble back up to his feet on the other side of the portal. “You turned out to be a poor substitution anyways – I shoulda – I shouldn’t’a waited. Fucking _sentimental_.”

Rick _hadn’t_ been naïve to think there was some kind of truce – the largest most fundamental unspoken agreement they’d both subconsciously obeyed – to leave each other alive if not undamamged. Rick could only guess at what held the Old Man back when he could have bludgeoned Rick to death – when he could have tossed Rick’s unconscious body out into space to die almost instantaneously, when he could have pulled that blaster out and shot through Rick’s head without a struggle.

It was probably the same reason the bastard never pulled the trigger on the nights he got so plastered he held a gun to his own head. Whatever the Old Man was, he was still human, and that base instinct - the desire to see yourself _survive_ \- was inescapable.

A moment ago, even as Rick was bringing his cuffed hands down on the bastard’s face, the thought of _killing_ the Old Man had never passed through his mind. But if ever there lived a sliver of remorse inside Rick – that human instinct to hold his punches with the Old Man, that mad repulsion at the idea of hurting a version of himself, the last dregs of decency that made him feel like shit for hurting a lonely old man – it burned up and dissipated in a wisp of smoke.

_Dead,_ the Old Man would be out of his hair forever. The brightest future Rick had imagined – the one with him and Morty exploring the multiverse on their own – had still been haunted by the ghost of the Old Man’s pursuit, his presence so omnipotent that he’d never imagined taking him out of the picture. But if Rick _killed him first_ , he’d be _free_. _Actually_ free. He wouldn’t need to ditch his ship since it was probably bugged and he wouldn’t need to risk his own ass hiding out in Federation territory as he cobbled together portal technology and he wouldn’t need to always be looking over his shoulder like a man hunted.

Dead _was_ better.

Rick glanced down at the portal gun in his hand, fatalistically aware of what he had to do and _hating_ it – he’d have to start from scratch, it might take him _months_ , but with the Old Man dead, the timeline wasn’t so pressed.

Right as the edge of the portal started to shrink and the Old Man’s feet came into view, staggering in place slightly where they faced Rick – the bastard no doubt holding his pistol at the ready while Rick crouched naked and weaponless on the other side – Rick had a brief moment to hope he wasn’t about to take _himself_ out in a moment of desperate genius but even that had more dignity than being shot in the head by that fucking bastard.

Lifting the portal gun over his head and bringing it down in a long arch, he chucked it top down at the floor in front of the Old Man’s shoes, the tinkling of glass shattering unheard over the laser blast aimed for Rick’s head. Rick dove wildly towards the work desk, the hair beside his ear singeing with the heat of the shot.

The Old Man breathed one delayed, “ _Shit_ -” before a deafening explosion nearly burst Rick’s eardrums and turned his thoughts into one angry hurricane of violet pain that hovered on the edges of his vision like an afterglow. One powerful inrush of air pulled at his legs, dragging him towards an angry swirling mass of green, and Rick clung to the bolted-down desk leg with both his cuffed hands. Behind him, frozen in an earsplitting scream and trapped in a web of neon fluid, the Old Man was _dissolving_ – the skin melting off his bones, eyeballs popping out of his head like bursting tomatoes, skeleton glowing lime green before it too shriveled up into dust and fell to the floor.

The portal fluid burned itself out in less than ten seconds, the sucking air cutting off abruptly, dropping Rick to the floor where he scrambled away from a pile of deatomized bones. He startled when the blown out husk of the Old Man’s portal gun clattered to the ground, half propped up in the Old Man’s dusty remains.

Rick sank back, exhausted and feeling all the aches and pains afresh as adrenaline leached out his system but he refused to take his eyes off the little heap of ashes, half convinced the bastard would reform out of nothing, fueled by spite alone to throttle the last remaining life out of Rick.

When quite some time passed and that didn’t happened – Rick’s gasps turning to soft pants, his heartrate slowing, the pulsing headache behind his eyes hitting an impressive crescendo – he finally let himself breathe out a sigh of relief that he belatedly realized he’d been holding onto for a very _very_ long time.

It hurt to move – it hurt to think or open his eyes or _exist_ – but Rick forced himself into a sitting position and then slowly to his feet. He wanted the cuffs off but the glance he cut to the assorted bloodstained tools littering the desks swam. The bastard had the key in his pocket when he’d _melted_ or whatever so Rick would have to pick the lock and even though he had a device exactly for that purpose, the pulsing of his head would make finding the damn thing a literal nightmare. So he stumbled past the desk and lurched his way towards the medical pod.

It felt a little too much like shutting himself in a casket filled with too-bright light but he hurt badly enough that the tight confines barely registered when he laid down, linked his fingers over his sternum, and watched the shiny hull close over him. He barely heard the soft hum of it turning on over the agony in his head and before he’d finished asking himself how long it would take to start up, he was out cold.

* * *

“Healing complete,” a soft female voice murmured, practically in Rick’s ear, and instinctively he winced in expectation of pain but he had braced himself for nothing. He sucked in a long breath through his nose, one that only had the faintest trace of copper, the barest hint of old blood. Rick opened his eyes to a thin shaft of light that expanded as the capsule hull flipped open to let him out.

Rick sat up slowly, the memory of his vision swirling and head throbbing leaving him with a ghostly fear of incurring more agony. He wasn’t sure the medical pod could heal brain damage – according to the Old Man, even in the new millennium head injuries were a mystery to the humans of earth – but wherever the medical pod was from, they seemed to have that shit down pat. Rick was clear headed and the gaps in his memories were seamlessly sealed. He didn’t realize he’d been harboring a not-insignificant amount of dread over the thought that his brain might have been permanently damaged until he tested out the clear shape of his own thoughts.

Unfortunately, for all the pod had been able to solve, his hands were still cuffed in front of him. He looked down at his arms, eyes skimming over the smattering of circular burns to land on the manacles, flexing his wrists apart to feel the pull of the chain, oddly emotionally detatched. They didn’t carry the same weight they used to now that the Old Man was a literal pile of dust (Rick cut his eyes up to glare at the ashes that used to be the Old Man – still there – good) and the thought of being bound wasn’t an immediate precursor to something else.

Easing himself out of the medical pod, still weirdly surprised the motion didn’t inspire a tsunami of pain, Rick padded to the crumpled shape of his jeans, ignoring the little heap of atomized Old Man.

Rick had long ago streamlined the process of picking the lock on the cuffs with a little spindly device so with deft fingers, he fished it out of his pants pocket and dug it into the keyhole, the familiar clacking whir easing the line of tension in his shoulders as the cuffs popped open and dropped to the floor with a thud. He pulled his jeans back on, prodding at the metal with his big toe.

He’d pictured Morty in those cuffs – thin wrists wrapped with cold steel, fingers twining together nervously, futilely tugging for freedom – and while a lot of that was still appealing ( _very_ appealing), Rick decided he’d design Morty his own set of manacles. Ones shaped to fit Morty’s smaller wrists with rounded edges less likely to bruise. They’d be different. _Better_. And Morty wouldn’t hate them so much as Rick hated the open circlets of metal at his feet.

_Morty_. 

Getting Morty might be trickier than he’d originally imagined. Begrudgingly, Rick admitted to himself that the Old Man had made a valid point. His eyes flashed again to the little heap of ashes and then flitted away. He could see it now so clearly, where the Old Man had fucked up – he made Rick _need_ him but had never made him _want_ him. There was a world of difference between those two things and Rick mulled that thought over, troubleshooting.

Rick wouldn’t be cruel, he wouldn’t make Morty _hate him_ , he’d be his _friend_. That shouldn’t be hard – Rick felt the loneliness radiating off the kid across the galaxy like a heat signature and whatever made the Old Man such a sadist hadn’t hit Rick yet. If he could help it, it _never_ would. So he would make Morty _want_ him as much as he _needed_ him. He’d wrap the kid around his fucking finger.

Still, it meant Rick would have to go slow – slower than he wanted to when a huge part of him still figured it wouldn’t be the _worst_ idea to nab the kid and get to know each other later. They’d have all the time in the world once they were out exploring the multiverse together – but there probably would be a lot less _weeping_ if Morty had an idea of who Rick was before they shot off into space.

Avoiding the broken glass still littering the middle of the room, Rick searched for his phone. He found it balled up in the shirt he’d been wearing earlier. The fabric was still wet with blood, a reddish-brown mark radiating out from below it, staining the mattress.

A glance at his watch told him the sun was just starting to rise over the Smith house on Earth. Morty was probably asleep, comfortably tucked into his dorky star-printed sheets, the day spreading out in front him heavy with routine. Wake up, go to school, eat dinner, jerk off, then back to bed to go to sleep and do it all over again the next day.

Rick approached the pile of the Old Man’s ashes from the side, bending over easily to pick up the blasted-out hull of the portal gun and giving it a little shake to dislodge the bone-remains clinging to its edges. The thing was in bad shape but the inside wasn’t as burnt up as the metal casing had led him to believe. _It_ wasn’t salvageable but there was enough there to reverse-engineer a lot of the technical designs – something that should drastically cut down on the time it would take him to make one of his own.

With a grim smile, he tossed the device onto the desk to be examined later.

Feeling too amped up to sit, he paced the floor in front of the work desk and smoked the clove cigarette he’d been craving since he woke up while he typed away at his phone. Faking documents, registering for classes, forging emails. Rick never thought he’d find himself re-enrolling in _high school_ , especially not as a twenty-year-old adult – but it wasn’t like he could show up at the Smith family house as Beth’s estranged father. He could pass for a teenager, not a septuagenarian, and if Morty never found out Rick was technically genetically his grandfather, it would be that much easier to get in his pants. And that was happening no matter what so Rick _very much_ wanted to exploit any shortcut to his advantage - his dick was already hard and insistent, sensitive skin nudging against rough denim. The sooner he got his hands on Morty, the better.

He lit another cigarette and paced the apartment in search of his least dirty clothes with none of the urgency of the last time he’d dressed himself. There wasn’t the threat of a maniacal Old Man looming over him and the loss of that weight was bizarre and electrifying. He was alone for the first time in _years_ , free to do anything he wanted, and what he wanted was very nearly within his grasp.

Rick was sitting behind the wheel of his ship - finger hovering over the start-engine button - before he paused, smoke collecting in the domed ceiling as the burning ember crept closer to the filter.

In a burst of determination, Rick shoved the ship door back open and stomped to the tool cabinet, pushing things out of his way until he found the dust pan and broom.

All that was left of the Old Man was swept up in two strokes, the ashy powder faintly tinted neon green when the light caught it at the right angle. Rick set the dustpan down on the desk and glared at the burnt remains wondering when his familiar friend wrath would turn all the sharp edges inside him into something useful but the ever-present rage simmering under his skin had gone cold.

It was strange to be so empty - so hollowed out. He wasn’t _sad_ , but he wasn’t anything else either.

Rick kicked the bottom drawer of the worktable, opening the empty silver compartment that led to the incinerator. Anything dumped into the shoot was crushed and set on fire and if something somehow survived the 2000° inferno burning below, it was jettisoned into space where it would inevitably burn up upon descent to Shmlaron.

Rick took one last long drag off his cigarette and breathed out, “Adios, motherfucker,” in a plume of smoke, snuffing the butt out in the middle of green-tinted ashes. With a twitch of his wrist, the broom, the dustpan, and everything in it dropped into the trash compactor with a dull thud.

Rick kicked the drawer closed with a resounding thump, reveling in the faint mechanical whir of the shoot opening up below his feet – the _flash-whoosh_ of the incinerator’s heat – the clank of the jettison door sliding open and then closed.

Something glinted on the desk catching his eye and he snagged up the Old Man’s metal flask. Miraculously it was still mostly full and Rick took a long sip, the sting of shitty whiskey burning all the way down his throat before he slipped it into his jacket pocket.

When he blasted the ship out of the hangar – for the first time riding in it _alone_ , picturing the boy who’d very soon be sitting in the seat next to him – Rick knew he was standing on the edge of something bigger than what he had before, something massive, something Rick was really _really_ going to like.


End file.
